When Carrie Golus was growing up in Grand Junction, Colo., she dreamed of getting one thing.
Out of Grand Junction, Colo.
That’s how it is when you’re a kid. Home seems like the worst place in the world and the world itself — the big, unknown thing that lives behind the sunsets and in the books you read — seems like the answer, if only you could get there.
What Golus didn’t know was that, at approximately the same time she was writing and sketching furiously in her journals in Grand Junction, Patrick Welch was doing the same thing in Chelmsford, a small British town just outside London.
They grew up, met, married, moved to Chicago and now Golus, 31, and Welch, 35, do in collaboration what each did separately in those early days, when each was dreaming of elsewhere:
They employ words and images to describe not only the world they see, but the world they wish could be. The couple’s work, a hybrid of art and advocacy journalism that has appeared in comic books, the local free newspaper NewCity and a Web site (www.team-alternator.com), is on display through July 15 at Las Manos Gallery, 5220 N. Clark St., the first exhibition of their joint creations.
“If you want to do what we want to do, you have to be in a big city,” Welch said on a recent evening in the couple’s Hyde Park home. The walls of the wide, spacious rooms are lined with Welch’s vibrant paintings.
“In the past, we found small-town life culturally claustrophobic,” added Welch, a slender man with ginger-colored sideburns that trail down the sides of his narrow face.
Golus, who has short auburn hair and an intense expression regularly softened by a self-deprecating laugh, recalled that when they lived in Savannah, Ga., “We just didn’t flourish there.”
They are flourishing now, both said. Although Golus had published two comic books of her work, “Alternator: Grand Junction” and “Alternator: Eight Stories,” a few years ago and Welch had exhibited his paintings in galleries, combining forces — Golus’ words and Welch’s drawings — opened up new artistic possibilities for the pair.
Their pieces look like comic strips, but actually represent journalistic expression. Golus interviews the subjects of their stories; all quotations in their pieces are verbatim. She and Welch photograph the people and places about which they write, and from the photographs Welch draws the images.
The work is a throwback to the illustrated newspapers that were popular a century ago, when artists painted city scenes that were published in lieu of the fledgling art of photography. We have come to think of the painted image as a fiction, as an artist’s rendition, but in earlier days it was regarded as reality.
Their favorite subjects, Golus and Welch said, are historical preservation and political issues. Thus they have done pieces on vintage Chicago buildings that face an uncertain future, such as the Uptown Theater, along with vexing public policy questions such as gun control and the death penalty.
While many contemporary comics deal with social issues — superheroes no longer have a lock on the comics genre — the work of Golus and Welch is different because it’s non-fiction. They research a story just as a journalist would.
“I’ve heard people say, ‘The dialogue sounds so real,’ ” Golus said with a rueful smile. “I say, ‘It is real. I went there with a tape recorder.'”
A piece on gun control, for instance, chronicles an attempt by Golus and Welch to buy a gun just outside the Chicago city limits. The comic strip quotes the gun shop owner and Golus and Welch; the illustrations depict the sleek-looking guns under glass.
And if the succession of panels sometimes seems crowded with detail, the words and images elbowing each other aside to garner the reader’s attention, that’s OK with the artists, Welch said.
“They’re not necessarily easy to read. There’s a vast amount of visual information we can cram into a page. When you read a comic, it’s like you’re mainlining information.
“We want to make people look and think,” he added. “This medium allows us to touch people in a profound way.”
A unique medium
Michelle Peterson-Albandoz, owner of the Las Manos Gallery, was intrigued by the uniqueness of their work, she said.
“What’s special is their highly intelligent aesthetic and their politics. It’s exciting and refreshing to see young artists who are talking about politics in their work.”
Creating each piece can take up to two months, Golus said. “It’s ludicrously labor-intensive. But after we’ve done this journalism, we have this piece of art.”
She and Welch met in London while waiting in a bookstore line to have Art Spiegelman, the acclaimed cartoonist who created the Maus Holocaust comic and whose work routinely appears on New Yorker covers, sign a collection of his work.
They married seven years ago, returning to the United States when Welch accepted a job teaching art in Georgia. But Golus, a University of Chicago graduate, was eager to return to Chicago. Two and a half years ago, they did.
“Chicago is a great city for artists,” Golus said. “People here are interested in art, but they’re not pretentious about it.”
Golus, who works in the public relations department at U. of C., said collaboration with a spouse initially was challenging. Each was accustomed to working on her or his art alone. “We’d never collaborated at all — and now we were collaborating on deadline.”
The deadline part came about through NewCity, whose managing editor, Elaine Richardson, saw the possibilities of the Golus-Welch partnership right away.
In late 1998, recalled Richardson in an e-mail, “Carrie had pitched Brian [Hieggellke, NewCity’s editor and publisher] on the idea of doing illustrated feature stories — which he liked — and she came to me with an idea about the death penalty.”
The result was “Death Row Funnies,” an illustrated account of Golus’ interviews with participants at a rally against the death penalty. The piece was published in NewCity’s March 4, 1999, issue. Their work has appeared semi-regularly ever since.
“It was topical, it captured the emotion of the event and profiled a contentious and much-covered event in a singularly non-traditional way,” Richardson wrote.
“We liked it so much that we encouraged Carrie and Patrick to pitch us more ideas. It’s just kind of snowballed from there.
“What I like most about their work is that it conveys so much. . . . Everything that Carrie writes has to correspond to Patrick’s artwork, frame by frame.
“At the same time, Patrick’s artwork needs to say all the things Carrie can’t fit in. There’s a necessary symbiosis that they capture beautifully.”
Welch also paints, Golus writes
Golus and Welch have continued with their individual work as well; Welch paints and Golus is writing a novel. “Like every English major,” she added with a laugh.
Their collaborative work blends their respective passions — words and images — to engage thorny social and cultural issues. It may look like a comic strip, but at heart it’s closer to The New York Times than to Superman.
“People sometimes read our stories and say, `So it’s true?'” Welch recalled. “People can’t get used to the idea that it’s reality. So I tell them: `See the work. Just see the work.'”
