Haunted Cinemas

Tess, a good friend of mine, contacted me last month and asked if I would design a poster. She and I go back a long way, we met in Edinburgh in 2005. I was studying, she was travelling and we were both finding family and new roads in the red velvet, Lynchian dream that was The Cameo cinema. It was the year I started university and the year my father died. Sometimes I would go to the late shows and sleep in the back of Screen 1. I was between homes and it was the safest place in the world.

Tess has begun running a film festival in her home town of Lethbridge, Alberta. When she gave me the brief ‘Can you draw a cinema filled with ghosts?’ the Cameo came to both our minds. She wanted two four colour riso prints and the words ‘riso print’ always throw my brain into a bit of a tailspin. I never think I’m going to be able to picture the finished product as well as I’d would like, there will be a lot of digital work (my mind wanders a way if it’s made to look at a screen too long) and it all just floats outside of my comfort zone.

I started by drawing cinemas and ghosts over and over gain. I hated having to draw the seats. I’m too much of a perfectionist not to want to measure out all the spacing correctly but I’m also too impatient to see such a meticulous process through to the end. Graph paper and a light box does a little to allow me to be careful and lazy all at once. I end the day I drew these ghosts with ink on my head and my nose and smudged on all the pale surface across the house.

As an illustrator, I began working in colour late. If you ever read my first graphic novel Idle Women: On The Water, black and white was my world. Incidentally it was a 30 below February in Tess’s basement that I ink at least thirty of the pages for this book. I still approach colour with an air of caution. I play it safe with primary and secondary bases. In short I’m still learning. I’m thinking about the Cameo and the grassy prairies that fold the town of Lethbridge in their undulating arms. I hate the ghosts, the colours and everything I’m doing. I go to bed.

I hand ink the blacks and sweep blocks of pink, teal and yellow over them. Nothing is making the drawing come together and I can’t work out why. As requested, the buffalo has found its way into the drawing. The Galt Museum which hosts the festival was given a Niitsitapi (Blackfoot) name, Akaisamitohkanao’pa, in 2022 and the buffalo is a strong symbol of the Indigenous folk on whose land it stands. Originally a little buffalo ghost was suggested but they established themselves in the architecture and it seemed the right thing to do.

I still hate everything else about the drawing though and decide to sleep on it.

And it comes to me in the early morning. In that little space between waking and sleeping. The image of the screen near the top of a portrait image, softly illumntiang the rows of seats below it. A rectangle of light that calls spirits to it like a beacon. The paper was the wrong way round and that is why the picture wasn’t working. I spring out of bed and with pencils, black Winsor & Newton drawing ink and a nibbed pen I finally conjure the image of the the cinema I saw from the back row as I was falling asleep. Or from behind the partition where you could steal a few minutes from the film on your break or as you made your rounds of the floor. It fills the page like it was always there.

The ghosts come last and they howl in like a party. They materialise in the small hours too. A carnival procession approaching from a very distant point. They are very definite shapes all of their own but unlike any ghosts I have drawn before. The colours can now be played with and tweaked until I think I’m going to lose my mind. The separations give me a headache.

But it is done. Friday is upon me. The ghosts leave me as loudly and erratically as they arrived. The end.