Profile: George Cochrane
A page from George Cochrane's "Long Time Gone"
With his show at Mass MoCA, artist George Cochrane is taking the populist form of the graphic novel and mashing it up with Greek literature and gallery art in order to offer a new language — it’s the result of years of trying to find a way to express himself.
As a painter, Cochrane had become frustrated with what he wanted to do and what his medium allowed him to actually accomplish.
“I’ve always been aware of what I couldn’t express as much as what I could,” Cochrane said in an interview this week. “I always wanted to tell stories and did my best in the world of painting by creating painting cycles and series of works and bodies of works that attempt to approach the notion of some sort of narrative tissue that would attempt to connect the work. Ultimately, I remained unsatisfied with what I could say in paintings, such that in the back of my mind somehow, I was always hoping that something else would come along, though I had no idea what that would be.”
The answer came not as a working artist, but in his role as a teacher at Fairley Dickinson University in New Jersey — a eureka moment initiated by a student who wanted to draw comics and needed a program of study mapped out for him.
Cochrane fashioned one from his brief working knowledge of the form, and watching the student create his pages ignited inspiration within Cochrane’s own mind.
“It just came to me in a flash — why don’t I do this?” he said. “I can tell a story. I don’t know where it came from, and I have no explanation for the idea, but in a flash, it was to make a graphic novel, base it on a day in my life, base it on ‘The Odyssey.’
“’The Odyssey’ is 24 books — there are 24 hours in a day, each chapter will be an hour, and ‘The Odyssey’ is also ‘Ulysses’ by Joyce, so I’ll look at those two texts as a way to provide the structure to telling my story,” he explained.
There was one problem, though — he hadn’t read any graphic novels between 1987 and when he re-read those same graphic novels in preparation for the student’s curriculum. He had a lot of work to do familiarizing himself with the history of the form — like Odysseus and Steven Daedalus, he had a long journey ahead of him.
“Over the past year, I have really just been in my own course, beginning with some of the earliest comics that I have come across that have been gloriously reprinted and reissued lately,” Cochrane said. “It’s a great time for discovering so many of the old strips — as well as trying to get a sense of the major figures and trying to understand what their work is about — and at the same time begin to learn an entirely new language.”
A page from George Cochrane's "Long Time Gone"
Cochrane immediately began filling in the 20-year gap in knowledge. In high school, a friend had recommended the works of acclaimed graphic novelist Alan Moore, alongside those of James Joyce and William Faulkner. He ingested all that Moore’s works had to offer at the time but never went further.
As a kid, he had read Tintin books, which certainly gave him a sophisticated, early understanding of the form, but knowing it is there and breathing it in are two different things. Cochrane then decided to inhale the language into his lungs.
“It’s totally new to me — an alternate history that’s existed under my nose that I’ve never given attention to,” he said. “It’s a visual history, an art history, a literary history. It’s all and none of the above and it’s totally open. I feel like it’s full of opportunity and possibility.”
As a painter, Cochrane had always been interested in portraiture, moving from expressionistic, figurative paintings that attempted to capture the human experience in a way that he wanted to stand apart from other attempts.
In his artistic journey, he moved from those to paintings of trees that made use of their anthropomorphic qualities and later to dogs, utilizing their ability to mimic physical manifestations of humans’ emotional states. Next, he began producing paintings of his daughter, Fiamma, in various costumes — which was the beginning of his collaborative work with her, but still not exactly what he was looking for.
Cochrane said he needed something akin to an awakening — an enlightenment — to move past the traditional “painterly pursuits” and into the art of graphic storytelling.
“I was a prejudiced person — I was defensive about painting,” he said. “Painters can feel very assaulted by video artists and installation artists. Here you are, trying to make this old thing in this old way, and it’s hard to feel fresh. I was very determined, but it took me awhile to get over it and start to open up to the idea of that, yeah, be an artist, but maybe make a video — which I never did — and, yes, I can be an artist and make a graphic novel. Those were the steps, but it took a little while, because I had to get over my own snobbishness.”
George Cochrane's graphic novel collaboration with his 7-year-old daughter.
Once he did, it was with full force. Using the guidance of his local comic book store, Cochrane has been furiously plowing through the history of sequential storytelling and adding it to the mix of experience that makes his unfolding graphic novel — two chapters are currently on display at Mass MoCA, with a third chapter due in time for DownStreet Art this summer.
The unfolding 24 chapters will be years in the making and will take the form of gallery shows and, hopefully, various collected book printings.
As an autobiographical work, the novel includes not only actual representations of Cochrane’s daily life and thoughts — as well as his daughter’s — but the stylistic studies he makes as he devours the history of comics.
This movement comes through in art style, as well as page layout. Layout is one of the major differences between a story told in a painting series and a story told in a graphic sequential format. Canvases don’t use the same language in breaking down action and intent — and as Cochrane learns his new language, he admits he can be akin to a child mimicking the teacher’s inflections.
“I can walk you through a page and tell you what I was reading,” he said. “It’s like, ‘Page 2 and 3, I was reading Swamp Thing.’ There was a way those pages were assembled that got into me as I was laying it out. Then I just jumped into Nemo, and there are all these Nemo conceits in the dream pages that appear — and, of course, Krazy Kat.”
At the same time Cochrane learns, he has added a parallel element in his daughter who, at age 7, is forging her identity and learning to write as well. In collaborating on this project, he is also building a connection to a generation that he sees as already embracing the language. It’s as if there is a generation of young artists who know how to speak a hidden language. Cochrane is determined to crack that code alongside his own daughter, who stands a generation further in that march forward.
“It’s flying around out there, whether you want to use the word zeitgeist or not, but it’s a language,” Cochrane said. “I teach college kids — they’re all making their own strips; they’re all writing their own stories and publishing them online. They’ll all reading each other’s stuff. It’s just happening. There’s an appetite for it, and it seems open to this younger generation as a way for them to tell their own stories in a way that definitely was not on my radar at their age.”
Cochrane has moved forward on campus as well, creating a graphic-novel society and an interdisciplinary program to help students realize an area of study that they are obviously interested in. It’s given the artist an opportunity to give back as well as to receive, and in the process to offer others the practical tools to receive and apply their own eureka moments.
As a painter, Cochrane said, graphic novels have offered the key to a creative locked door. As a teacher, he is taking the fulfillment of his own dreams and passing it along.
“My desire is to make an encyclopedic work,” he said. “I’ve always wanted to make something where I could put everything that I knew into it, and here’s a chance where the project has a long enough stretch of time ahead of me that it feels really possible.”
No Comments Comments Feed
Add a Comment