Destination WSU

Destination WSU

Spring 2009

Hooper

A Small Story and Introduction by James Irwin

A Home in Granger, Washington

I first met Lee after his family moved to Granger. He was staying back and forth between his grandmother and mother's home. I visited him mostly when he was at his mom's and rarely at his grandma's due to the distance.  He did, however, "travel" and moved to Flagstaff to "briefly" to take a break from all the stresses on his life. He occasionally messaged me on myspace, but not really. He was primarily focused on school and repairing a relationship with his father, whom he's never also had the best relationship with.

When he returned after a couple months; he was different. He had cut his hair himself, was a bit arrogant about how hard he worked and even set himself up to live with a "foster" family.  During this time he took photographs with a camera his older brother had bought him for Christmas. He enjoyed going out on walks with his friends or alone.

Some of the pictures that I really enjoyed I took from his old myspace. The quality of the pictures aren't very good. I've talked to him about the originals and whether or not I would be able use them to post his works; however, they were lost on his old computer during the summer of 2010 after being corrupted.

For the last semester of his high school career he was busy, but still going through some personal business.


These images are from an old abandoned elementary school that Lee visited after church one Sunday.

These images are a treasure to him as he was discussing with me after asking him if he had the originals. He claimed that he's really glad that someone like me is shadowing him and had saved these images, although they are all probably floating around the internet. In retrospect, Lee said that he really loved the character of or essence of this place.

"During that time I was really, or still am,  depressed and felt like that place on the inside... ...run down, not really empty, deteriorating, and isolated."

I didn't really know what was going on for him during that time, just that I knew he was going through a rough time and helping him when possible with advice and consolation.



Without further adieu, These are his images.

The Abandoned School

photos from Spring 2009

December 29, 2012

The Morning Sketches of December 29, 2012

Lee had posted a status update on his Facebook account: "rummaging through your pics to sketch, be afraid! be very afraid!"

He had even posted a few respectively on people's walls.

Lee is a bit of a weirdo and he loves to draw, he took out a Crayola marker set and lied on the floor with his frazzled hair and baggy eyes as he put on music and sketched.

his preliminaries were done in light pencil and then coated with color and heavy black outlines.

He spent a lot of time looking through his friend's photos and had no real way of really considering many. Most of his sketches became crumbled trashed before I could get a hold of them. All of them unsigned and not dated. Other than the fact he drew all morning until and shared what he kept.

Lee's work, I'd say, is heavily influenced a lot by the people he admires most his friends, family, and artists such as Jamie Hewlett, Jim Davis, and many Japanese Animators and Comics, as well as American comics such as Marvel and DC.  I don't know much about art, but I have been friends on and off for over a decade and have seen Lee's progress from small comics to various doodles from notebooks and time spent alone that he'd share later at school.

As long as I've known Lee he's always been drawing. However, it wasn't until the past couple years after we started college that he's been more aggressively, or passionately drawing more and more. Things he sees, things he thinks, and obscure and not so obscure things that tickle his fancy as well things that he asks people like me, his friends, or family (especially his "kids" or nephews and nieces ask him to do). As far doing things for people, I've known Lee to go out of his way; but not out of his boundaries. He has trouble mostly due to procrastinating.