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 Julie
Doucet
Julie Doucet was born in 1965 in Quebec, she speaks
french. Ex-cartoonist, she has lived in Montreal, New York, Seattle
and
Berlin. She currently lives in Canada. In 1991 she won the Harvey
Award as best talent and she published for some of the most
popular reviews such as “Weirdo” edited by Robert
Crumb. It’s
impossible to us to list all the reviews she published for.
a domanda – risponde.
What about Not being in love any more
with comics?
Q:People say you are giving up with comics, or that
comics are becoming a small part of your work. You don’t love
comics any more or you are only changing your main goal for a while?
A: Yes, I am less interested in comics and I
am afraid I don’t regret having stopped drawing. I’d
been drawing for 12 year, and that was all I’d been doing.
I was sick of it, I was sick of so much work for so little money,
I had no chance of carriyng on drawing if I wanted to survive.
Nobody wants to believe me when I say that for me it’s
over, but that’s the truth. I am doing tons of new stuff
now,drawing, etching, xilography, engraving on linoleum and a
lot of tiny books printed in serigraphy.
Dreams
and drawings.
Q: In some strips we can find histories of the dreams
you had. For some cartoonists dreams play a big role. I am thinking
for instance about Crumb and obviously Zograf’s dreams. Do
you think drawing dreams could be a kind of “flowing” of
conscience and that there could be a connection between your way
of telling histories and the way in wich dreams appears to you?
A: I draw my dreams because they were weird and
they had, in a sense, some aesthetic value to me. I am not really
into supernatural and psychological things..so I don’t really
know how to answer at the last part of your question.
The telling of things.
Q: Your care for details and setting in your strips
it’s peculiar. It seems like things can tell more than baloons
usually do. Is it a choice or it came spontaneously while you were
drawing, without a proper awareness of it?
A: I have often consciously chosen what to show
into a strip, like obkects, details and so.. Have you seen something
that I haven’t noticed?
About portrait
Q: Your last works are portraits. What led you
to stop with narration and come to a synthesis ?
A: I’ve always been charmed by faces and
portraits: I found a book with pictures into a bin in a park in Berlin,
and I realized an etching on linoleum of them. From my point of view
everything was focused on faces, nevertheless interpretation was
important to me. I needed to leave comics and do complitelydifferent
things, to complitely change my way of approaching art.
Your
travel
Q: I know you recently made a trip to France. What
have you seen? Do you think France is still the main centre of comics
in Europe or something is changed? What do you find interesting at
the moment?
A: I spent ten days in Paris in january. I went
to Angouléme, but I wasn’t there for comics. I was there
to see some old friends. The only thing I can say at the moment about
french comic scene is that everyone, I mean authors and publishers
are on war with eachother! I’d never heard so many malicious
gossips in my whole life!!They told me that was due to small publishers,
which saturated the market. I’m out of gossip scene at the
moment, and all that I can say is that the new stuff is coming from
Europe, not from United States.
Technology. Technlogy??
Q: Does technology play a role in your everyday
life? And in your work? What is your relationship with new media?
What do you think about comincs on the net?
A:Computers are wonderful tools. I loves e-mails,
I love being able to send my illustrations to newspaper in that
way. I use computers to decompose colours for SERIGRAFIA... but
except for that, I am not patient at all in front of a monitor.
It just doesn’t work to me. I have some problem in watching
tv not doing anything else, and seeing comics on the net just doesn’t
appeal me. I use computer as a tool, I have no prpblems in taking
it into consideration as a mean..but this is my problem.
Elettra Stamboulis
Translation: Chiara Romanelli |
