The Publics

Freelance Aristocrat: a decently educated, cultured individual who skips from metropole to metropole but rides the subway in every city he (or she) inhabits. These types are similar to the Monocle demographic, but stripped of their overpriced attachés, tailored shirts and contrived obsession with all things “design”. Magazines, marketers and brand engineers have sought to define and capitalize upon the traffic patterns of this overachieving global underclass, but those who fit the bill remain unaffected and unaffiliated.

Aran Darling, a Paris (via London, NYC & Vancouver)-based illustrator is about as close as one can get to achieving this vision of a free and easy sophisto-tramp lifestyle. He has a website, and it details his trans-continental adventures in a way that reads like a long lost sketchbook from a Grub Street poet. The following is a communiqué he sent me a few weeks back.

A. Darling:

wwww.arandarling.com celebrates its one year anniversary of showing full page drawings. First put online with the help of a friend as an experiment on new year’s eve, 2007,it originally showcased some small line-drawing cartoons and stories. Arandarling.com became a regularly updated full-page illustration website one year ago today, july 4, 2007.

Posting drawings and writing was a way for the site’s creator – yes, me, a darling – then living in new york city, to communicate with an absentee girlfriend, a fairly petite dancer with an e accent egu in her name, in chicago, illinois. In the autumn, the love affair with the dancer ended and the scope of the site’s intended viewership changed … becoming a vehicle for communication with a wider audience.

I started drawing with liquid ink, switched to smoother paper, sold a few originals, took some commercial commissions and moved to paris where people seem to have an innate sensibilty when it comes to understanding and scrutinizing drawings. The site now welcomes hundreds of visitors from over 30 different countries. The site’s creator however, still sneaks on the back of the bus to avoid paying whenever possible, lives off a sandwich a day and just yesterday ate a peach which he found on the floor of the number 6 metro while it was stopped at denfert rochereau on the left bank.

Spotted it (the peach) sitting there, unbitten and unblemished, and I literally had to get on my hands to knees, during rush hour on the hottest day of the year, to get under the seat to grab it. This woman in a business suit was frightened because she thought I was trying to sniff her crotch or attack her knees.

Free peach though.

The project’s goal (the website, not the peach), roughly, is to form sort of externalization for what’s going on within.

Of course that’s just a silly metaphor that i don’t actually believe.

It is, in its most basic form, a way to exchange ideas. Homo sapiens have never been solitary creatures, so we play. this website is a game. it is a game of words and word play and a game of ink squiggles. But make no mistake, it is a serious game. Especially these days when all of our surnames are @____.com, and our internet footprints, for better of worse, compose a great part of our identities. and our movable and traceable identities, furthermore.

So it is personal.

It is play and it is work and for me it has become everything in between. (end quote)

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