August WIP

Good afternoon, Blackbirds!

For August‘s postcard, I’m was inspired by some J. C. Leyendecker and Cheri Herouard illustrations to play with clashes of eras. Leyendecker‘s illustrations compare silver screen film stars and their iconic roles; Herouard’s expose the Modern Girl as she was then, in the 1920s. Now, both of these antiquated sets of illustrations read a little differently, as every one of their figures reads like a period costume to us. In my opinion, there’s an extra little creative delight in imagining these figures from wildly different eras encountering one another, when neither of them is the audience proxy for the times of today. It’s a concept that always doubled the charm for me. 

I wanted to use it to reflect on a concept that’s always been at the heart not only of the Merry Blackbird Postcard Society but of my entire creative practice as a whole. There is something deeply restorative about contemporary queers being in conversation with a queer past, both real and imagined. I think very often of an Angela Carter quote about how in finding herself in fairy tales, she aims to “stake my claim to a fair share of the future by staking my claim to my share in the past”. When you know that you were part of the threads of history then, you are assured that you are part of the threads of history now, and that there will be a future for you and people like you. That, as Sappho wrote 2,600 years ago, they will remember us, even in another time. 

Thus, I’m starting what I hope will be a series of illustrations that are both charming and fun studies of period fashions, imagined encounters across the centuries, as well as subtly carrying one of the greatest fixations of my work: the threads of queer lives tangled across time, speaking to one another, speaking to us now. 

Your Society President, Penpal-in-Chief, and Occasional Thinker of Thoughts, Marlowe Lune