About 20 years ago I started drawing my own friends. After drawing all sorts of characters for all sorts of years, I started to collage and then draw an odd bird,a strange gal, a wierd young lady I named Janet Groundhog. Janet was the public question answer girl at the Eggville Public Library. I drew her as a little bit like me and a lot like my real friends and a lot like a young woman coming into her own with other people and ideas.
Her stories appeared in the little zine I made from 1995 or 6 until 2002, Trustworthy. Trustworthy started when I was an art history graduate student essentially looking for an excuse to be creative, collaborative, goofy, and to make small pieces of pretty and slightly subversive writing and drawing.
Janet's stories were amalgams of my own stories and those I dreamed up. She lied to impress her summer camp friends, she fell in love with a tree scholar and grew restless, she impulsively set root in a Vermont town. She figured out, or rather, I figured out (through drawing her and writing out her stories and sending them out all over the country on a semi-regular basis) some core ideas about place, people, and memory.
And Janet started writing more ( I wanted to have her write a bodice-ripper but never did) and I started painting more. I've been thinking of more Janet stories but I really haven't been drawing her. I'm about to close my old old old email account which is all spam but which has the first website I ever made and that holds the Janet and trustworthy stuff, so I thought I'd put it on this lblog simply so she doesn't completely fade into complete obscurity because, well, she's still one of my favorite imaginary people.
I may still finish the Janet story or breathe some new life into her, but in the meantime, enjoy what pops up here and be nice to everyone you meet on the street as Janet Groundhog would have you do.
take care,
Rachael
