Graphic artist Bishakh Som presented his work last week at the New School in conjunction with the New York Comics Symposium. Som’s drawing style is dreamy and lyrical and his stories are biting (sometimes literally) and contemporary. He was trained as an architect and his backdrops (spaceships, follies, cars, suburban subdivisions, apartments) are fully alive, rendered with the same detail and complexity that his characters are. His storytelling is gentle and elliptical, and he sometimes leaves frames empty – without action and dialogue – and these frames have surprising emotional force. This, the power of a place, is something that most architects don’t understand. They're typically too concerned with composition and joinery, perspective and procession, to recognize the primal, visceral force of a low ceiling, a high window, an empty stretch of road, or the light spilling across the kitchen floor early in the morning.
After discussing his comic influences (including TinTin, Archie, and Love and Rockets) and his technique (black ink brushwork, watercolors, and Photoshop) Som read a story called Come Back To Me, about a young married woman who lives in a secluded beach house. She’s not asking her husband, who frequently travels, to come back to her, but a young man she met during one of her husband’s absences who, unexpectedly, swept her away. To convey that movement, a falling, Som shows the lovers pulled into the ocean by violent undercurrents, clinging tightly to one another as if they are the same person, simultaneously fearful and thrilled. The water is rendered as a dense, grey field with knife-like folds. We see the woman in the midst of an experience that she will never, fully, come back from.
Artwork from Come Back to Me by Bishakh Som. Published in Blurred Books.
