Strangers

The Stranger (Primitive Sketch 26) Color

Digital image created with the Sketchbook app

10/9/2023

There are things that have been creeping, crawling and flying around on the pages of my various sketchbooks and in some of my art making iPad/iPhone apps for a while now.  I've been calling them "Strangers".  After sharing these images with others, I’ve received some questions about them.  I thought it would be worthwhile to write about what they are, their origins and a bit about how I may incorporate them in various projects moving forward.

Much of the art that I’ve created since college has been abstract or non-objective.  By this I mean art that doesn’t represent or depict a recognizable, “real” subject like a person, place or thing.  The Strangers are more figurative or representational.  Art that falls into this category has some kind of recognizable “real world” subject in it.  At times, the Strangers look like robots, at others they look like alien spacecraft and sometimes they look like aliens themselves (at least this is how I see them).  Of course, aliens and spacecraft from distant galaxies aren’t “real”...... or so the government would have us believe (cue X-Files theme music).  Still, as I look at these things I have fun imagining a world or story in which they do exist.  For now, this world is contained in my own thoughts and in the art that I create.

One of my original Stranger drawings
Created with the Sketchbook app
October, 20 2022

One of my original Stranger drawings
Created with the Sketchbook app
October, 20 2022

To go a little deeper, I imagine that the Strangers are here on earth and/or orbiting around it.  Where they come from isn’t clear.  Perhaps they’ve traveled here from some distant galaxy or maybe they’ve found their way here from a parallel dimension.  Why they are here isn’t 100% clear either.  I don’t imagine that they’re here to interfere in the comings and goings of things on this planet….. Not yet anyway.  For now, they’re just observing and gathering information.  For what purpose?  This is yet another mystery.

In case it’s not painfully obvious by now, I’m a bit of a science fiction/fantasy enthusiast.  I have been for almost longer than I can remember.  If I dug deep enough into my past, I could probably find countless examples of experiences that fueled my interests in this form of fiction, but the one that stands out the most might be when I saw the first Star Wars film all the way back in 1977.  I was seven years old at the time.  That film fueled the way I played, daydreamed and made art for years to come.  I spent countless hours acting out scenes from this film, or making up entirely new ones, with my brother and various friends using action figures based on its characters.  All these years later, I can still get lost in fantastical worlds in movies, TV shows or books.  In 2001, for instance, after seeing The Fellowship of the Ring, the first film in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, the 31 year old me felt like he was a seven year old kid all over again.  I guess you can say I haven’t lost touch with this part of my youth even though action figures are no longer a part of how I “play”.

The Stranger Arrives I
Digital image created with the Sketchbook app
December 14, 2022

Speaking of The Lord of the Rings, the name I’ve given to these things that I’ve been creating was borrowed from a character on The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power TV show.  In this show, the “Stranger” arrives in Middle Earth in a meteor.  Through most of the first season we are left to guess this character's true identity. Is he good or evil?  Is he Sauron, the show's main antagonist, or is he a wizard who has been sent to help protect Middle Earth from his evil schemes?  I guess you could say that I’ve not only borrowed the name of this character for my creations but also his ambiguity.

The Stranger (Rogue One)
Digital image created with the Sketchbook app
February 19, 2023

Over the course of the last couple of years, I’ve watched the Strangers “evolve” in various ways in my art.  I thought I might compose a timeline of some kind that illustrates how they’ve developed.  This might be a project for another time, but for those of you who are curious you could simply scroll through my Instagram profile all the way back to October 20, 2022 and you can see for yourself how these things have changed up to the present.  Moving forward, there are 2-3 things I can see happening with this subject:

1. Create, and possibly publish, a Strangers coloring book.  This is an idea that has been bouncing around in my head since the fall of 2023.  The truth is, most of my artistic efforts in recent months have been directed at this project.  I have about 20 drawings that I’ve deemed “complete” up to this point and I’m in the process of creating more.  I may go into more detail about this project in another blog post.

2. Create more “stand alone” Stranger themed art.  I’ve taken breaks from time to time to create pieces that are not coloring book related.  In some cases, I’ve taken pages intended for the book and colored them myself.  

3. Write a Strangers book(?).  This is a relatively recent idea for a project that I’m putting on the back burner.  I recently read a book by Simon Stälenhag called Tales From The Loop which planted the idea for this project in my brain.  This is an alternate history science fiction story told mostly through Stälenhag’s imaginative, eerie illustrations about his life growing up in Sweden near an enormous underground particle accelerator and research facility.  While I’ve been familiar with his art for a while now, I only recently became aware that he published them in a book with accompanying text.  I just finished reading it and I found it to be truly fascinating!  It’s not difficult for me to imagine a book about the Strangers borrowing from Stälenhag’s playbook.

The Stranger (Phase I) Revisited
Coloring book page
Digital image created with the Sketchbook app
June 26, 2024