Troutman Drawn to Comics

There is a tendency to dismiss comic book art, as if its commercial application somehow makes it a lesser art form. But if one were to tell Christopher J. Troutman that his art has a comic book flair, he would take it as a compliment.

Troutman, associate professor of drawing at Lamar University, will present “Sequential: Studio Art and Comics,” at The Art Studio, Inc., Oct. 5-25, opening with a free reception, 7 to 10 p.m., Oct. 5.

“I was trying to think of what to call the show, and I always have ‘narrative’ or ‘time’ or something in my titles these days, because I like comics,” he said. “I did a search to see what are comics called? — sequential art or this and that. I remember seeing an NPR story with someone saying, ‘You don’t need to call them sequential art or graphic novels. All that is trying to make them sound so important. They’re just comics, all right. Just chill.’ So, I thought, all right, I’ll just put them both in there.”

Troutman often features large-scale images that incorporate panels or juxtaposed images that seem spliced together from different stories. It is the panel work that is the most obvious nod to his love of comics.

“Comics have always been a background for me, so they pop up in all the different things that I do,” he said.

Troutman said he got into comics by watching “The Maxx” on MTV’s Liquid Television in the ’90s.

“They make 12-minute episodes from the comics — they’d even take panels from the comics and animate them, just move them around with voiceovers,” he said. “I started buying the comics and doing thousands of drawings of the Maxx character.”

In college and grad school, Troutman did comics for the school paper, but he said he hasn’t seriously done a graphic novel or anything like that, just a few page stories.

“I’m just daydreaming about, if I do a comic it will be about this, be about that,” he said. “We’ll see. I usually just come into big drawings because I think I have a hard time being patient enough to plan out the story, do all the layouts. I feel like there’s so much prep work. If I do it, I just want to go ‘first panel’s blah, second panel’s blah, then blah, then blah, then blah.”

Troutman’s drawings have the feel of being panels from a larger narrative, as if we are seeing a story that is unfolding just beyond our reach. But he said he has not thought about putting the large drawings together.

“I feel each one has its own story,” he said. “I remember going through Google and finding Degas drawings and paintings, where it looks like there’s the same person — the same hat — and trying to put them in order in the same document to make a story, so it’s something I’ve been thinking about.”

The exhibition will feature drawings and paintings, and some drawings in ink that are large and some smaller pieces that Troutman exhibited in Japan in a sumi-e exhihibition.

Troutman’s wife, Rie Fujimaki, is Japanese, and the pair lived there from 2003-2006, where they taught English at a school. It was there he really drew influence from the art and combined it with his comic-book background.

Troutman wanted to teach art so he built a portfolio and the pair moved back to the U.S. so he could go to graduate school at Long Beach State University. He is now into his seventh year at Lamar.

Troutman will also feature some of his digital drawings, a project that he developed for a creative faculty fellowship. Troutman draws on a tablet before printing out the images and adding paint to the large-scale prints.

“The point was that I would study how to use the software and then bring that into classes and also have some exhibition opportunities for students in Japan,” he said.

An exhibition of student work will be held in Japan next summer.

Troutman adds the ink or paint to the print to make the prints one of a kind.

“I did that to put my own touch to it, to make it one of a kind,” he said. “I’m not comfortable with the idea of being able to print out a whole bunch of them.

Most of Troutman’s digital work has been black and white, but he plans to develop his skills with color — both digital painting and actual paint, whatever will stick to the paper. Drawing with a stylus requires a different set of skills than traditional mark making with a pencil or charcoal, Troutman said.

“You have to find a way to make it look good,” he said. “If you are drawing by hand, for whatever reason, there is more control — more pressure you get a thicker line, less pressure you get a thinner line.”

The brushes that are in the software do not yet match the feeling of hands-on tools. Troutman said he works on lots of drawings trying to figure out how to get the digital drawing to have the feel of the non-digital.

“I’m having a hard time figuring out a system to make it go fast,” he said.

Troutman said that students who have experience with hands-on drawing tend to find something lacking in the digital application.

“You’re missing that tactile experience,” he said. “There’s something more immediate about ink on paper. (Digitally) you can control-Z and get rid of it. (On paper) you have to find a way to make it work — it’s a different kind of relationship.”

Troutman takes disparate elements and splices them together to create a single split narrative. Sometimes, the images are told in the same way from slightly different angles in the same drawing. In the image on the show’s invitation, he has superimposed the familiar Beaumont landmark, the Jefferson Theatre, over an image from Beppo, Japan. In another, he has a single image of a train going under a bridge, but one quickly sees that it is two images spliced together.

Troutman makes no apologies for drawing on his love of comics and weaving them into his art.

“If you’re talking about the elevation of the comic, maybe you’ll see that there are some features to comics that are pretty interesting, that connect to other forms of art,” he said. “I think it’s a valid form of content.”

Story by Andy Coughlan, ISSUE editor