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Jim Woodring Biography

James William Woodring (born October 11, 1952) is an American cartoonist, fine artist, writer and toy designer. He is best known for the dream-based comics he published in his magazine Jim, and as the creator of the anthropomorphic cartoon character Frank, who has appeared in a number of short comics and graphic novels.

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Jim Woodring Quotes

If I had learned how to get along in the quotidian world while keeping up the search for the hidden realm, I might have gotten more out of life. But I believed I was doing hugely important work. I was elitist about it.

Elitist, Important, Might, Realm, Work, World

I don't believe in art like I used to. I believe in something beyond it, something that contains art and everything else. But I just don't quite have the nerve to chuck drawing and painting. Part of it is that I enjoy it too much, and part is that I don't have the courage to renounce the world. I don't want to move out of this nice neighborhood so that I can live in a shed and devote myself to meditating and touching something I can't feel. I'm addicted to the fun of playing in the world.

Art, Fun, Move, Nice, Used

People aren't interested in seeing themselves as they really are.

Interested, People, Seeing

I'm not a freak. I'm not really crazy or anything. I don't think I'm really abnormal. It's just, like anybody else, I have interests I cultivate, and one of my interests is not getting too used to things. I've sacrificed a lot of things in my life in order to keep that sense of things being unfamiliar.

Crazy, Freak, Order, Things, Thinking

The books that I do, the stories I write - I'm glad I'm able to do them, but they will quickly be swallowed up by the sands of time. Sometimes it frustrates me that I'm not able to do bigger, more important, more significant things. I guess you have to be content to do whatever it is you can do.

Book, Glad, Significant Things, Swallowed, Write, Writing

The fiction I tend to like is nothing like my own work. I like the kind of writing that shows me things I don't know about, and what I don't know about is the everyday, normal world.

Everyday, Fiction, Know, Writing

Alternative cartoonists have to rely on comic book stores to get their stuff in the hands of readers.

Alternative, Alternatives, Book, Hands, Stores

Real shapes and real patterns are things you would observe in nature, like the marks on the back of a cobra's hood or the markings on a fish or a lizard. Imaginary shapes are just that, symbols that come to a person in dreams or reveries and are charged with meaning.

Cobras, Dream, Marks, Real, Reveries, Symbols

I wanted to be a pariah, because all my heroes were cult artists, people who devoted their lives to poking into very narrow, very deep corners - Erik Satie, Alfred Jarry, Malcolm Lowry - people who suffered in order to express their vision of life.

Artist, Artists, Hero, Order, People, Poking

That Moorish architecture is all over the place, of course. It affects me everywhere I see it, as it does so many people. But Brand Library was a special place to me, and I know I've paid homage to it many times in my drawings.

Drawing, People, Place, See, Special

ONE OF THE BEST MEMORIES OF MY LIFE IS CONTEMPLATING THAT FIRST FINISHED DRAWING AND REALIZING I HAD CRACKED THE CODE, THAT I COULD MAKE DRAWINGS LIKE THIS WHENEVER I WANTED.

Code, Cracked, Drawing, Firsts, Like, Memories

I think that cartoons have a lot more power than they're given credit for.

Cartoon, Cartoons, Credit, Power, Thinking

When I started formulating the first Frank comic, I knew I wanted it to be something that was beyond time and specific place. I felt that having the characters speak would tie it to 20th-century America, because that would be the idiom of the language they would use, the language I use.

America, Character, Characters, Having, Place, Ties

Cartoons are perhaps a bigger part of art than is generally realized, and they influence people in ways that are not always recognized. But creating a monumental work of architecture, or writing a great symphony, is something else. It's a higher order of creation.

Art, Bigger, Order, Symphony, Writing

To my way of thinking, the concept drawings that Rembrandt did, the drawings he made that he used to model his artists, to work out the compositions of his paintings: those are cartoons. Look at his sketch for the return of the prodigal son. The expression on the angry younger brother's face. The head is down; the eyebrow is just one curved line over the eyes. It communicates in a very shorthand way. It's beautiful, expressive, and, in a peculiar way, it's more powerful than the kind of stilted, formalized expression in the final painting.

Beautiful, Brother, Peculiar, Powerful, Shorthand

A tree is an incomprehensibl e mystery.

Incomprehensibl, Mystery, Nature, Tree

Leslie Stein's comics give readers privileged access to a complete and wholly original world of gently skewed wonders.

Complete, Give, Giving, Readers, Wonder, World

People for whom art is religion can say, "What I love about art is that it points to a higher reality. " Well, fine, but the time comes when the smart thing for such a person to do is to let go of the fun of the art and get into the hard work of attaining and understanding that higher reality, unmixed with worldly games.

Art, Fun, Letting Go, People, Smart, Thing

When I was a kid, I used to see apparitions and have hallucinations, and my entire perception of the world was badly disoriented. And I had kind of a chaotic childhood because of that. I've really hung onto it, though. Because I actually like those feelings.

Chaotic, Childhood, Feelings, Hallucinations, Kids

Consensus reality seemed like a dull, dead-end street compared to the intense, mutable reality of visions or whatever they were - neurological misfires. I expected life to be full of sudden, inexplicable surprises. When these things didn't happen for a while, life seemed dull and painful.

Dull, Life, Reality, Seemed, Things, Vision

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