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Artist Statement

 

            My illustration is based on a story I wrote for English, about a shirt who was very sad because no one would buy him. He sat alone on the shelf, season after season. When someone finally bought him it was as a gift for another person. The person doesn’t like the gift at all and leaves the shirt isolated in the closet for years. The shirt slowly deteriorates and grows lonelier with each passing day. The illustration shows a room with only shadows where the material thing, the thing that really matters, is gone. The shadows are alone in the room with no substance to keep them company. As the oldest child in my family when my little brother was born I often felt that he was getting more attention and this made me feel very sad and neglected. Eventually the abandoned shirt in my story unraveled and was replaced by a better looking shirt. But luckily, in the end I got over it my and was not replaced by a better looking kid.

 

 

And the story that inspired it:

 

Traveling, Unraveling

            He had been still ever since the day he was made.  Only having known the cold touch of a machine, he longed to feel the warm rise of a person’s chest against him.  Once, for a fleeting moment he had been picked up.  Unfolded, pulled and tugged on, straightened out, but then put back.  It seemed he had been sitting in the same spot for years.  He could feel his white threads gathering dust as he sat there on the shelf with others like him.  He wanted something different.
            Then one day he felt himself being lifted, slid across a glass surface and put somewhere very dark.  As the darkness enveloped him, now more than ever he wished for a companion.
            A young boy, his liberator, was looking at him know.  The boy picked him up.  What a glorious moment! He now had someone to spend his days with! But when he saw the look on the boy’s face he knew his enthusiasm was futile.  The sheer disappointment, there was no way of hiding it.  As if instinctively, the shirt knew he would not be given the attention he deserved.  And he was right.  He spent the next six months alone on a closet shelf.  Again, the feeling was so familiar, being alone, feeling rejected. 
            The shirt knew he deserved better but there was no way he could command the attention he needed.  And how could he? A young boy would much rather have a model airplane than a shirt, he was sure.  He was also sure that there was no way he could become a model airplane.  So he was stuck there, destitute and alone on the dark shelf in the small closet in the grimy room.
            The last glimmer of hope he had was when the closet door opened and a light shined on him.  He had one feeble flicker of optimism when a left hand reached for him but that flicker extinguished when he saw what the right hand was holding.  A brown nondescript paper bag with ripped edges and only one handle.  He was shoved into the sack where the bottom was lined with socks that had no pair and lazy cutoffs from hot summers.   He was driven far away and left on the side of the road, the bag abandoned on a dust paved path in the country.  Ever so slowly the bag slipped towards the ground as if being willed straight down by a large lonely hand, hoping for company.  But there they sat, together but ever lonely in the bag.  The shirts’ white threads began to take on a greyish hue as they slowly unraveled leaving nothing but the shell of a fallen soldier which smelled of empty childhood remnants of a dusty weeping whisper.

 

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