My husband calls them "baconheads" and the tag has stuck: "I see you're drawing another baconhead," he'll say as he passes by, looking over my shoulder to see what I'm so diligently working at, and I'll laugh and say, "yup." The house is getting crowded with them. More seem to arrive daily.
I don't see them as zombies or post-apocalypse survivors or descendants of that poor devil screaming on Munch's bridge or, for that matter, as representations of any particular or even generalized inner torment--or any torment at all, really. To me, they aren't unsettling or disturbing; I find them good company. But then I'm a weirdo and I tend to attract weirdos. I see the baconheads as kind of "happy" characters in an odd sense, which is about the only sense I possess. They're seekers, outsiders, mad monks, perhaps, the sorts of folks who talk to themselves on the street, who live in a world peopled and creatured more fabulously than the one godforsaken "normal" citizens inhabit. If anything, they are transfigured characters living in a transfigured world.
I don't know why exactly I feel compelled to give "life" to them, or why they're marching through me like a doorway, like I'm the driver of the daily bus from Weirdsville, but I've long since come to understand that "why" is not a useful question to ask, especially when it comes to art. They'll pass out of my life eventually, I suspect. But for now, they are everywhere I turn and I'm throwing out the welcome mat for as long as they care to stay. They've come for a reason; they have something to tell me or show me or teach me. I'll leave it at that for the time being.
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