Jet Pack

Art © Ray Fawkes

Ray Fawkes (The Apocalipstix, Mnemovore) is a cunning writer, fearsome with a pen in hand, but he’s about to go too far. He’s taking that pen of his and he’s drawing pictures with it. Writers should do that, for sure, but Ray is drawing and painting actual pictures, and he’s getting better at it with each passing day. It makes me afraid. Soon there will be no stopping him.

If you haven’t yet, take in Ray’s story, “Black Strings,” and his gallery at Tor.com, and then come back here.

This week, Rays taking part in the ROTOR-style project called 5 Lights, which in itself didn’t surprise me. But he’s not in there as a writer, which did surprise me. (Meaghan O’Connell’s the writer this time out, and her new piece “Muscles Better and Nerves More” will make you hurt, it’s so good.)

Ray’s art is gorgeous, but he was so ingrained in my head as a writer that this revelation that he could work brushes as well as he could pens sort of threw me down. Then it raised the bar up over its head and said, “I make my own pictures, bitch.” I was an illustration major for a while — I know enough to appreciate how hard it is to do well.

So I did what I do when I see something new: I questioned it. Here are my five questions and Ray’s five answers.

Will Hindmarch: Tell me a little bit more about 5 Lights and what you’re doing there.

Ray Fawkes: 5 Lights is a collaborative art project, bringing five artists together each month and setting them loose on four themes, allowing them to riff, jazz-improv style, around those themes. Photography, illustration, music, the written word, and video are the disciplines; the media and content are nearly unlimited.

I’m the featured illustrator this month, working watercolors as my instrument of choice. Every image I’ve created for the project is brand new, and will be unveiling to the public for the first time on the 5 Lights site.

You’re a proven writer, across a bunch of textual mediums, and you told me you were a little surprised to be invited to 5 Lights as an illustrator. Do you think of yourself as an illustrator yet?

Heh. I do, yeah — but I’m still surprised about it. I’ve been painting and drawing relatively quietly for some time, letting my writing take the front seat in my career. Recently, though, my artwork has started creeping up from the back seat, and, thanks to the encouragement of some good friends and compatriots, I’ve decided to start showing  it publicly. So it’s not so much that I don’t think of myself as an illustrator — it’s that I’m still pleasantly surprised to find that other people do.

How does your experience as a writer inform your illustration?

It feeds it, in an oblique way. The urge to tell a story and the tendency to symbolism in my prose both seem to bleed into my deliberations when I put pencil to paper. I find myself constructing a sort of foundational story to each image as I work, and hints of that story tend to show up in the finished piece.

You seem to be focusing on analog materials for your art — watercolors and ink. Why’s that?

It’s all analog for me. I’ll do some digital edits if necessary, but I tend to shy away from them. It’s all got to do with my reasons for painting and drawing — I often do it to take a break from my other work, which is almost always on computer. So the illustration is my “sunlight and open windows” activity, where everything is tactile and silent.

As your illustration work expands and refines, is it changing the way you write?

Mmmaybe? I can’t say for sure. I’ll be doing a hell of a lot of both over the next year, as a couple of as-yet-unannounced projects hit the table, and I might very well find the processes feeding and changing each other. Ask me again in 2010!