I KNOW WHAT I AM

In an art form that has so much potential, I’m always annoyed that the field of comics has been dominated over the past fifty years with super heroes. That is why it was such a delightful surprise and welcome relief when “I Know What I Am, The Life and Times of Artemisia Gentileschi  arrived at my door. The book is a beautifully drawn and cinematically told biography of Italy’s greatest female painter by Gina Siciliano. It was originally done in three separate volumes and is now collected in hardback  edition from Fantagraphics Books at $29.99. 280 pages  7.75 x 11.25  (Don’t know if there is a softcover edition or not.)

The three volume book tells the story of Artemisia Gentileschi, who has learned to paint as an assistant to her father in 17th century Italy. In her life of isolation she flourishes as an artist, surpassing her father as a talent as she ages. She survives not only as a teenager being raped by her  teacher, but endures a long and humiliating trial to bring him to justice in the male dominated society. And if you survive the plague, life doesn’t get much easier in the volatile political/religious atmosphere of the era. The expression “watching a rose grow in concrete”, seems to be an apt description of her life. While Artemisia’s most famous work was “Judith Slaying Holofernes”, she was constantly working and left behind a large body of work. It has only been in the 20th century that her abilities as an artist have been truly appreciated and her place in history assured.

While the Italians have been producing historical biographies like this since the 1970’s, I’m not sure there has been an American artist who has invested this much time and energy into a graphic novel of this sort. In fact, to call it a “graphic novel” is limiting, because it is so much more than it. It is also a well researched and footnoted scholarly work, as much a history book as an engaging biography. 

Gina Siciliano is no slacker as an artist. Her pictures are done in a naturalistic style with a strong sense of value and dynamic compositions. While I haven’t seen her originals, she seems to work with pen and ink and a bit of pencil thrown in for shading at times. She definitely avoids the digital process. Her characters give dramatic performances in their posing throughout the story. The architecture and costumes are impeccably  done perfectly capturing the time period, very much as if Gentileschi’s own painting have come to life to tell their story. 

How to describe her approach to writing continuity is a bit difficult. At times she uses the traditional frame by frame method most cartoonists use. But often the story breaks down into the Big Little Book style, with a picture on one side and a page of words on the other. Consequently, there are sections where the words end up fighting with the pictures for which will one predominate. Perhaps because she has approached this a history, we are often given a lot of facts that are great background, but they tend to slow the story down as we ware through them. Since the book is heavily footnoted, I would have preferred to have seen a lot of this text in that section rather than in the body of the story itself. 

As the poet Andrew Marvel wrote, “were there but world’s enough and time”. This seems to be one of the creator’s dilemmas. Trying to tell the story in only three volumes with  all of it’s rich content proves to be a difficult task. As a visual guy, I would have liked to have seen more of Gina’s remarkable drawings to tell the story, and to do that this project might well have taken a half dozen volumes instead of just three. Hey, she’s young, what’s the problem with working for another decade on a book? Seriously, I sympathize with trying to work with a project of this scope. And there is so much of her own personality that she incorporated into her  work.  What she has accomplished is quite unique and extraordinary. I don’t think we’ll be seeing a Siciliano X-Men book anytime soon, but I do think this work will be one that will have a lasting impact. 

I met Gina when I think she was about five or six years old when my wife Annie and I were visiting Portland for a comics show and we got together with her parents, Sam and Mary. Her mom was a childhood sweetheart, the first girl I had a big crush on as a boy. One of my vivid memories as a teenager was listening to her playing the violin while her father accompanied her on the piano. I was mesmerized. We grew up in the small town of Auburn Heights, Michigan and our families were often socializing. While we went to the same school,  Mary got double promoted when we were in sixth or seventh grade and then switched schools so I didn’t see much of her after that. But we have still kept in touch. 

Mary is now a retired professor of Literature and Writing at Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland. She has published short stories, prose poems and literary criticism in various journals. While she took a thirty year break from music, she is now back at it, but focusing on the piano. Her husband Sam is a retired database administrator for Portland General Electric, Portland's major utility.  He has published seven Sherlock Holmes' novels with Titan Press, one Sherlock Holmes novel with Otto Penzler Press and two horror novels with Kensington. I’ve read them all and loved them all.

So when I read Gina’s graphic novel, I know she had an excellent base to start with.