We Are All Chimera

We Are All Chimera. Drawing and entire black counterchange by James Lee (Jams2blues); color by Anna Lee.

Until I see a composition, I don't know what I'm drawing.

When I started this piece, I didn't have a plan. I put my pen on the page and let one line lead into the next. I started in one corner, and the line ended up going all the way to the edge of the next corner. Along the way, I created patterns and unfolded shapes, symmetries and environments. The forms sort of became and evolved from one section to the next.

It almost felt like it drew itself.

That's how I approach surrealist automatism, and how I draw most of my artwork. I let entropy dictate where my imagination sees something that should fit, something that compels the composition to move forward. I don't know what the whole thing is going to be. My subconscious is in control of that part.

Then I finally see what I'm drawing, and that's where I take over.

In this one, you can see a womb, a fetus, an eel, a butterfly, eyes, a vascular system. There's texture and dimension, and it all unfolded as I put my pen on the page. As those shapes appeared, I started thinking about DNA, genetics, all the different forms of life we're connected to. Okay, that's what this is about. I'm clearly drawing a chimera.

The entire black counterchange was my part, too. It fills in like a checker pattern. That is the super interesting optical work there. You can follow the alternation through the drawing while the shapes keep changing. Anna colored it in.

That's where We Are All Chimera comes from. The meaning of life, everything we're made of, all these forms that seem separate until you start thinking about what they share.

Chimeras turn up in mythology and in anime we like to watch, including Fullmetal Alchemist. We imagine these creatures assembled from different kinds of life, and then I look at an ordinary animal and think about how much history is already in it. A squirrel, a dog, an otter, a human, a whale. Each one comes out of an immense process of evolution. Keep going back and you get to the building blocks themselves, the atoms.

The word chimera gave me a way of looking at that shared history. That's what "we are all chimera" means to me.