A Wild Mess
Drawings inspired by a poem written by Kiik Araki-Kawaguchi
Kiik wrote the poem below for his Mom on Mother’s day 2014.
a wild mess
My mother she is called THE HEN
THE HEN she keeps her feathers
And calls these feathers her memories
Memories she flies on them a little while
Once or twice she flies around
Flipping her bird to the wind
Saying wind you will steal nothing from me
Her bird is what she calls her fuck-you finger
In the fucking face of a wind to remind him
He is nothing
And that she is a creature full of living blood
That can curse and do a dance
One day there will be no bird
There will be no THE HEN
I will be dead someday
Maybe THE HEN still will be alive
Doing her little dance
Of ten thousand joys
The air above her is a wild mess of feathers
Connecting a moment without life
To an instance of joy
So nothing good is ever stolen from this world
Kiik asked me to illustrate the poem so I spent some time thinking about it. I wanted to draw the moment where the Hen character gathers her memories or feathers as they flutter away in a wild mess. The Hen is a symbol for Kiik's mother, and maybe Kiik sees this desire to cherish and maintain her memories as defying mortality. To me its equal parts tender, tenacious, and futile, so I explored a lot of styles - cartoony, silly, sketchy, colorful and patterned. Looking back at the image I feel that the gestural work done in fountain pen connects most closely to the words.
