A Gorgeous Little Haunted Ecosystem

The Looping Vortex That IS My Brain...

I was only trying to make a featured image for an essay about the moon.

That should have been the end of it.

Instead, I looked at the finished image and realized it belonged somewhere else too.

It looked like my life, but not quite.

There were pieces of me in it. The CDs. The late night clutter. Teal curtains. Old keepsakes. Stacks of thoughts and unfinished things. The kind of evidence you accumulate when you have spent a lifetime obsessing over music, imagery, stories, photographs and beautiful weird shit.

But something had happened to all of it.

Reality had been dipped in shadow and handed back to me slightly immortal.

And immediately, my brain went:

Oh.

Vela.

Which requires a little explanation...

Vela Noir is the first graphic novel I have been quietly creating, although “creating” sounds far more organized than whatever the hell I actually do.

She and her world have been living privately in my head for a while now. Bits of story. Characters. Images. Places. Objects. Music. Colors. Entire scenes that sometimes arrive before I understand why they matter.

I haven’t shared much of it yet.

But suddenly there she was, haunting the artwork for something completely unrelated.

Except it wasn’t unrelated anymore.

This is how my brain works...

I call it the Looping Vortex.

A completely legitimate scientific term I just invented for the strange place in my creative mind where everything I have ever loved, photographed, lost, worn, written, heard, survived or become slightly obsessed with gets sucked inward and starts colliding with everything else.

Everything feeds the art.

A real memory becomes an essay. The essay inspires an image...

Something inside that image suddenly belongs to a fictional character...

The fictional character gives the original memory a new meaning...

That meaning inspires another photograph, another paragraph, another scene, another idea...

Eventually I’m standing in the middle of it wondering how the fuck we got from staring at a full moon through my living room window to building mythology for a graphic novel.

The art keeps eating its own tail.

And I love that.

I grew up inhaling music videos, movies, album artwork, photography, fashion, magazines and anything visually interesting enough to make me stop what I was doing.

I still do.

Except now there are decades of life mixed into the archive too.

Motherhood. Friendship. Heartbreak. Aging. Houses I’ve lived in. Clothes I remember. People I miss. Versions of myself I almost forgot existed. Random objects I have kept for reasons I couldn’t explain. Lyrics that permanently moved into my brain. The particular color of light in a room during a moment that mattered...

Apparently none of it gets thrown away.

It goes into the Vortex.

Maybe that is what creativity has always been for me.

Not inventing something from absolutely nothing, but letting everything talk to everything else.

A keepsake box from real life can eventually exist in Vela’s world.

A phrase from The Velvet Ledger might find its way into a notebook inside a comic panel.

Orion’s Belt can hang above more than one version of me.

A gold sequin top can stop being a gold sequin top and become an artifact.

Something painful can become beautiful without pretending it never hurt. Something ordinary can become mythology. And the fun part is that nobody necessarily needs to catch all of it.

I actually hope they don’t.

I like the idea that someone could someday read Vela Noir and never know that a tiny object in the corner of a panel once belonged to an entirely different story.

Someone else might recognize it immediately.

Some connections can sit quietly for years before the right person notices them.

That feels far more interesting to me than explaining every reference until there is nothing mysterious left.

It also makes me realize that The Velvet Ledger and Vela Noir don’t have to be separate little islands.

The Ledger can hold the real thought. The memory. The observation. The hurt. The 11 p.m. realization that probably should have gone to bed with everybody else...

Vela Noir can take those things, drag them somewhere darker, prettier and slightly otherworldly, then send pieces of them back.

My life feeds the Ledger.

The Ledger feeds Vela.

Vela mythologizes it.

Then the mythology sneaks back into my real-world art and starts the whole damn thing again.

The looping vortex...

A gorgeous little haunted ecosystem.

And maybe that is the closest I can get to explaining how my creative mind works.

Nothing I make really lives alone.

Everything leaves fingerprints on everything else.

Everything feeds the art.

And if you follow the trail long enough, eventually the art turns around and starts feeding me.