Just wanted to share a few recent "Gertrudes"--a cartoon that I love making.
This month marks 3 years since the 1st Gertrude popped out onto a notebook page in India, as I was deliberating over whether to move to Catalonia.
Many of my favorite Gertrudes are gestures of love towards friends in specific situations of life, loss, creation, vulnerability or power.
Gertrude comes to mind when there is a sense of the heart touching life, and being touched by life. This Gertrude (beelow) is one I drew today after harvesting armloads of basil and imbibing the scent all morning as I prepare to make pesto for now and for later...and still have plenty to give to the neighbors.
I am grateful to my mom for insisting 4 years ago that I find room in my overstuffed suitcase to take home the gift she had for me, Lynda Barry's Syllabus. I am grateful to Barry for her insistence that just putting hand to paper can bring us into another kind of mind and world. And for referring her readers to Ivan Brunetti's Cartooning: Philosophy and Practice. Brunetti's exercise of creating a cartoon character of simple shapes like triangles, circles, and squares was the midwife of Gertrude. Thanks for listening.