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This was my final project for my university's Artistic Anatomy class. We were given the liberty to present a work in whatever artistic field we preferred, as long as its theme was Artistic Anatomy and the focus was the human head.
I chose to present a small comic/ illustration book that portrayed the different units that were approached in class: osteology, myology, mimic muscles and comparative anatomy. We were required to do a bit of research for this project and, out of these subjects I decided to delve deeper into comparative anatomy. After some sketches (to be seen below), I drew myself as a fawn, since what interested me most in comparative anatomy was a class we took on hybrid beings, specifically mythological ones.
The comic is developed around a text I wrote regarding writing and how easier it would be to write something from the heart and that reflects what we truly are, if we could literally see inside ourselves.
Each page represents one of the units. The translation of the comic will be bellow the images ↓
Page one
In 5th grade, my Portuguese teacher told the class that to write poetry we have to look “inside ourselves”.
That, for words to be true and genuine, they should be a reflection of our inside.
I think that if I could decompose myself whenever I wanted it would be easier to find that “poetic truth”.
I would sit in front of a small mirror, the one my mother used to pluck out her eyebrow hairs, and I would do a sad face.
Page two
Maybe observing the way sadness is reflected on my face would tell me more about this emotion, how it is unique to me, or at least special, about what memory it evokes, what turmoils it provokes in my stomach and would bring me words to include it in verses, words that aren’t its synonyms that I have seen in the dictionary and repeated to their exhaustion.
I would then do the same with anger, fear, and joy.
What my muscles communicate to my poetic subject about what he feels might, maybe, stop being a mystery to me.
Page three
I wouldn’t have to make an effort on comparisons and metaphors for transfigurations. If I converted myself to a fawn in front of me, it would be easier to understand what he would write about the forests and mountains I idolise but rarely can bring them justice in words.
I would understand and it would become mine what he would write on dancing and music and wine, his specialties. How could I, without becoming him, describe the subliminal tastes of the grape juice, if I don’t even enjoy it. Wine is not interior to me. I would like if it was, I think it is a word that looks good in the middle of a poem. Sophisticated and artistic.
Page four
If I would go further, to a deeper layer, and, with my mother’s eyebrow tweezers, pulled out my muscles and laid my skull on my desk, I would like it if in the back of it, etched into my occipital, there were words that would surprise and confuse the archeologists that found me.
“Cogito Ergo Sum Artifex” - “I think, therefore I am an artist”.
That my thought bring me good ideas and beautiful words to explain them.
Sketches↓
