“Evening Falls”
Made for Comics Workbook
I enjoy the pieces where White’s style is influenced by Warren Craghead and Simon Moreton (this one clearly more by Craghead). It seems that White’s natural hand for drawing fits very neatly into the style and it leads to very impactful and purposeful panels, but it also moves his art away from it’s usual unpretentiousness. Fun for a vacation away from his usual style.
Influence aside, this is a prime example of expressionism in White’s work, and it’s interplay with his representational juxtapositions. There is a strong sense of space, even as the scribbled lines can sometimes obscure full understanding of what the drawings are actually of. Is that third panel a coat over a chair in front of…a desk? It doesn’t matter, really. The specificity of lines impart a sense of it being something real, even if you don’t know what it is. And what you can parse, a door, a plug in an outlet, all of that gives you a feeling of the room being described.
But it’s the lines themselves, and those little abstract notches, that give a sense of the viewer’s relationship with the room. There’s a sense of looking at something familiar, looking almost with derision or boredom. Stagnation? But at the same time, there’s an energy in it too. And the title of the piece, “Evening Falls”, suggests perhaps the figure has been here through the change of the light. And the tone of the room is almost like the tone of bad late night photography, with light bulbs turning into glowing yellow orbs and everything looks grainy and unnatural and dull.
There is no movement between panels, and compositionally we see the panels having their central focus off to the right, then left, then right, right, middle, bottom, etc. Bouncing around randomly, avoiding continuity and focus. This tends to create a sense of floating through a space dreamily, at a slow pace. The way the images are rendered are too messy to keep the dreamy feeling, but the pace remains.