| My drawings, sculptures, and installations serve as visual comedy, or a form of concrete poetry, and can mostly be credited to a failed attempt at mastering the English language. To me, rhyme, homonyms, puns, and euphemisms are more historically vital discoveries than fire. Although I interject social satire and politics into my work at times, my main focus involves stretching language, and utilizing wit as a true medium, alongside graphite, cotton balls, and colored pencil. Originally starting out in journalism, some of my earliest influences were traditional political cartoonists from Honore Daumier, to Thomas Nast, to Paul Conrad, with their ability to poetically quantify daily current events and global issues…. |  |
Eric Yahnker
My drawings, sculptures, and installations serve as visual comedy, or a form of concrete poetry, and can mostly be credited to a failed attempt at mastering the English language. To me, rhyme, homonyms, puns, and euphemisms are more historically vital discoveries than fire. Although I interject social satire and politics into my work at times, my main focus involves stretching language, and utilizing wit as a true medium, alongside graphite, cotton balls, and colored pencil.
Originally starting out in journalism, some of my earliest influences were traditional political cartoonists from Honore Daumier, to Thomas Nast, to Paul Conrad, with their ability to poetically quantify daily current events and global issues with a level of accessibility, economy, and more than a little black humor, by a 4 p.m. deadline. Essentially the aim of these cartoonists remains constant with mine: to create a textual, visual language meant as much to be read as viewed, as entertaining as enlightening.
From my years studying and working in animation, I was exposed to the hand-drawn extension of vaudeville, where written gags and kinetic comedic energy could be unleashed to its full-throttled, squash-and-stretch potential. One of animation’s greatest benefits is its ability to take place in any fantastical setting or time period with as much effort as it takes to simply draw it. The cross-pollination of the current with the historic, the analytical with the emotional, the divine with the agnostic, and all variances in between is an incredible tool for the animator, as well as the political cartoonist, in developing wide avenues for rich metaphor and comedy.
However, even more effective is when these comedic devices are simultaneously grounded in earthly visual reality. A live-action writer and film director such as Mel Brooks effectively twist history like rubber, effortlessly floating between centuries and settings in masterpieces such as Blazing Saddles (1974) and History of the World, Part 1 (1981). In this way, Brooks’ famous catch phrase “It’s good to be the king” cuts to the defining element of not only the lascivious behavior of Louis XVI, but also what it is to be an artist—a lord over your own creative universe.
When conceptualizing my work, I try to consciously weave all these elements together. Like a designer uses composition, or a painter uses color to lead the viewer’s eyes around a canvas, I try to use layered comedy to lead the viewer’s mind around a piece. If it’s firing on all cylinders, the humor should circulate into infinity—the more one excavates, the more the comedy swirls. Well, that’s the idea anyway.
