Drawn Out - Softcover

Nace, Don

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1932360794 ISBN 13: 9781932360790

Publisher: Soft Skull, 2005

Synopsis

"I wanted more than salvation. I wanted to be in the belly of the whale," Don Nace states in Drawn Out, a collection of raw and lyrical drawings that illustrate the story of a man's life, from a childhood dominated by the tragic loss of a father, through the agonizing and euphoric process of self-discovery to love, marriage, and fatherhood. The lines bind together fear and joy into the cloth that lets the artist dress after being stripped naked by the daily events of being alive.

If the skyscrapers and cathedrals of New York were dumped into the Canyonlands of Utah the resulting chaos would resemble Nace’s human figures. Drawn Out simultaneously captures the landscapes of New York City and the American southwest, animating the limbs of his characters with the crowded frenzy of New York’s gray canyon streets while showcasing the wide plains and big sky of the desert in his black and white scrawls. Within an 8.5 x 11 frame, Nace’s work relates the wide-open expanses of loneliness and the tight wire coils of alienation that expand and constrict the hearts of everyone.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

Drawn Out is a graphic keyhole into a modern man's soul. A rare and deeply affecting work of visual autobiography. —Eric Drooker, author of Flood and Blood Song

In Don Nace's Drawn Out, evocative, plaintive drawings -- imagined by a mad meeting of Beardsley, Schiele, and Feiffer -- redefine graphic in a graphic novel. Their lines, as in any drawing, make sense and nonsense of its protagonist's happy and sad experiences. Nace's unfussy short sentences shape the story, subtitles to a silent movie whose expressive faces and bodies relay feelings and flesh out meanings. The ambiguities and contradictions of our lives are beautifully rendered in DRAWN OUT by Nace's spidery, frenetic images, his acute understanding of images and words, our everyday languages.—Lynne Tillman

Drawn Out possesses a harrowing beauty that is difficult to express in words. The drawings are both raw and elegant, evoking, without imitating, Francis Bacon, R.J. Kitaj, and Chaim Soutine. The narrative is mordant and harsh, yet oddly romantic. In a world glutted with cheap sentiment and prefab emotion. Don Nace has produced a work that is genuinely haunting.—Joe Queenan

From the Inside Flap:

As we turn its pages, a childhood shadowed by the tragic loss of the artist's father soon gives way to the often agonizing and occasionally euphoric process of a young man's self-discovery. Before finally taking us through the rites of love, marriage, fatherhood—and all the adult dilemmas that they present.

Set in peculiarly American landscapes, from the empty vastness of the Southwest to the teeming crowds of New York, Drawn Out distills thousands of Nace's sketches into a spare and essential view of God, alcoholics, women, work, and the crushing details of daily life. Along the way, it is by turns brilliantly funny, deeply soulful, and quietly tragic.

About this edition

• Publisher: Soft Skull
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 1932360794
• ISBN 13: 9781932360790
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 240