Before I had a blog

This is hardcore tripping me out right now:

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3381/3343516736_a8e382d022.jpg

I drew this picture when I was 10!

I just rediscovered it tucked away in an old folder.

It is kind of boggling my mind thinking about what inspired me to draw this, and where in the hell I got the references for all these outfits at 10 years old. I pretty much have no clue why I drew this picture. It wasn’t any kind of assignment or anything like that. I think I’d maybe just gotten new markers, so I came up with this idea….

By the time I was 10 my family and I had defected from the Soviet Union, and after spending about six months between Austria and Italy, we’d been in the United States for 3 years at that point. Summer/Fall of 1991 was the year the Soviet Union finally collapsed. Maybe hearing about all this political news stuff had gotten 10-year-old-me thinking about countries…. It’s pretty interesting that the picture still says USSR even though it was drawn months after the coup. I wonder what it is I understood of all that noise at the time.

Anyway, it’s totally bizarre to discover this picture, especially right on the heels of the previous post, which is pretty much the exact same idea, just executed with img tags instead of magic markers, 17 years later. Clearly, I have been looking at culture and identity in this kind of analytical way for waaay longer than I’ve even been aware of doing so. I’ve been doing it my whole life.

 

Subscribe for more like this.