A situational report from the street

This is the third drawing i started when shaping my new series - set in the same street image as seen several times in the first piece "Welcome to Ohm".

This is the project description for the series:

I, Tor Gustad Molt, am 45 years old at the time of writing, and have a bachelor's degree in Fine Arts from Falmouth College of Arts in England in 2005, and in terms of style I have always been an "outsider artist".

The series I'm working on now is an ongoing introspective project that first took shape in 2003 after I read The Dice Man by Luke Rhinehart. Now, 20 years later, I find several, and not just red, threads in various ideas that have come since. When I look back at these, I see a number of connections and synergies, and my new series is a consequence and continuation of this. The series describes a society, a city that should collectively symbolize a self, a person, an individual. All internal processes (everything from digestion and the nervous system or muscle function to assessment and decision-making) are mirrored in a kind of visual metaphorical representation.

The project can be described with Wagner's term Gesamtkunstwerk; Wagner used the expression about his ideal of an opera performance where words, images, music, and philosophy were joined into one whole. The inhabitants of the city in groups each represent an emotion divided into a color system. Instead of feet, they have coloured pencils that write what they really feel. This is not to say that they are one-dimensional, they have many jobs and tasks - and coincidentally, they also document their lives through a graphic novel.

In several of these images, we see this novel in production, in various virtual worlds where you can apply for/earn access to. In these, others from the city are also at work, but there are higher degrees of access within these, which provide tools or mechanisms to influence the story. Both the one that shows up in these situational reports, but also the one that will become visible when my novel at some point materializes. This comic is still a work in progress, so the descriptions shown are not necessarily what it will look like when its finished. There are many interested in how the plots play out - as many have a lot at stake be it to lose or to win.

The background for these works, which have been given the subtitle "The search for the gut feeling", is a recognition that I have always had a poor contact (or at least a conscious one) with this universal “asset” all my life. Throughout my life contact with the heart and brain has dominated, built on a missing foundation of what I actually want. The result was an increased chance of life's decisions being made on the wrong basis. As a child I lacked any self-confidence in this way, and drawing became a kind of therapy or visual diary. In the absence of an internal language that tells me what I`d prefer in any given situation, external stimuli have been an important part of the balance. As I grew older, I developed tools and ways to deal with my insecurities - but as a child, I think this is the reason I took up drawing as a form of expression. As a way to make myself see what I felt. My mother always said "you carry your feelings on the outside of your body, Tor" Little did she know, how true that would turn out to be.

With this series, I try to create a landscape between graphics, comics and graphic novels. With each completed picture, I understand more about the world, and little by little I get to show my foundation and my background for the graphic novel - which will be made one day.