I've been thinking a lot lately about the overlap between art, comics, illustration and drawing. I don't have much to say about that right now, but I've been thinking about it a lot.
Anyone who follows me on Tumblr or Instagram (where I am "Inklines") will see that I overly hashtag my posts--I leap right into what my friend Stefan Bucher calls the "#hashtagmoshpit". #Art, #comics, #comicart, #cartoon, #cartoonart, #drawing, #sketchbook, #sketch, #illustration and #comix. That's me.
Years ago, soon after I moved to NYC, before the age of hashtags, I took my drawings into a gallery where the owner dismissed them as "illustrations." "What's the difference between art and illustration?" I asked naïvely. He explained that an illustrator might wake up in the morning and get an assignment to draw a giraffe and, because it was an assignment, it was an illustration. An artist might wake up and draw the same giraffe but, because the artist simply drew it, that made the giraffe art.
"No one tells me what to draw," I told the guy.