whale

As I was taking a mental break and drawing out some negative feelings, I realized the self portrait I was attempting didn’t hit right. My fatness was distracting. It reminded me of the reaction I saw to that scene in The Whale, near the end – “as shit as it feels to say, I couldn’t help but laugh. The image of it was just objectively funny.” As an artist (particularly an illustrator) your work exists within culturally defined visual shorthand. Fat = Funny. Fat person = comic relief. A fat person experiencing grief, or pain, or any serious and sincere negative emotion = a hilarious subversion. No matter how much I want to, I find it extremely difficult to cleanly convey what I’m feeling with my own body. I know this to be true from my real life as well, were I don’t have the luxury of removing that barrier to empathy.