Artemis Draws

It took almost a whole year from conception to the final product, but it is finished at last! This has been a rather difficult story for me to plot, draw and script the dialogue for, as I had intended it to be a few interwoven stories taking place at a cafe terrace based on Van Gogh’s famous night-time painting. The idea evolved from my original plan for the ‘cafe’ to possess a consciousness and a sort of omniscient narrator’s voice, to what it is now, interleaved stories involving the different patrons of the cafe and the young waiter, who begins and ends the tale with his melancholy, brooding presence.

After finishing “The Dessert”, I realised I wanted to explore a relationship along similar lines, i.e that of the secretly homosexual husband, and the emotions of the wife when she discovers the truth. Given my own limitations and inexperience in the comics format, I sometimes wonder if this isn’t overly ambitious story-telling, and I leave it to my readers to tell me whether or not it was a success. I have had such varied feedback from my stories and it is always interesting to hear different perspectives. It is all too easy to get into a cul-de-sac when one is interpreting and reading one’s own work, so feedback from others is always refreshing. Since I had been busy with other unrelated projects, there were many months when I did absolutely no work on the story at all. In September 2010, being confined in a hotel room in southern Italy while gales blew outside actually forced me to tweak the storyline and rewrite the final few pages on a borrowed laptop, after months of absolute paralysis as far as this work was concerned.

This was also the first work I had where I experimented with colour – just a few greys and blues, and I found it appealed to a lot of readers. However, I’ve decided in the end to keep it starkly black and white and more in keeping with the rest of my stories in this collection. I’m not averse to experimenting with subdued hues, but for now, I’ll stick to my black inks and see where my inspiration leads me next!

So, here it is, the Cafe Terrace is finally finished. And I hope it won’t take another year for me to finish another short story.