The Caretaker

So, good news – I've been drawing every day. The 15 minute rule is working so far. It's a small enough amount of time that it feels like it's always possible to fit it in somehow, whether it's gestures at a street corner while waiting for a friend, swimmers in the slow lane below where we eat lunch at the campus pool, or practice drawing leaves of the spinach I love so much, post-dinner.

A couple days last week my minutes (more than 15 in this case) were spent working on an illustration for the cover of a program for my friend Christine's play. She's putting on Harold Pinter's The Caretaker, for the PuSH festival coming up later this month. I've collaborated with Christine before, on the design of a poetry anthology she produced, and jumped at the chance to do so again. And I'm really excited to see the play, which she's staging in her apartment with an intimate 17 audience members per showing. Very cool. If you want to go too, the dates are January 27–February 6, with performances at 7:00 nightly, 2:00 on Sundays. Email caretaker.res@hotmail.com to reserve tickets.

Christine asked for the cover illustration to be "troubled but optimistic" and somewhat feminine, as she cast the play with three women rather then the three men it was originally written for. More of her thoughts on the play which influenced the illustration:

I like to tell people that I first got the idea of putting on The Caretaker when I moved into my new place and I was surrounded by boxes of junk – my junk. The truth is that my junk follows me wherever I go. No matter where I'm living, my home looks like the set of The Caretaker. Perhaps this is why I've become acutely aware of the situation in which Aston and Davies live: their susceptibilities to homelessness and mental illness. Being a woman, I've often thought about how tough it mush be for a woman to live on the streets. This is why I chose to cast The Caretaker with actresses. Homelessness is difficult for everybody, but a woman would be lucky to survive 24 hours on the street by herself. Though Harold Pinter wrote The Caretaker in 1959, it's still relevant today because we still don't have solutions for the problems this play addresses. – Christine Gibson