So, way back in the 20th Century, I was laid up for about a year with a serious case of bicepital tendonitis in which I felt like doing very little. I wouldn't work, I rarely played. I went to the doctor, I went to therapy (physical and psychological), I went to movies, and I started drawing.
Luckily, the tendonitis was in my right arm, and I am left-handed, so drawing was something I found I could do fairly comfortably. I had drawn a lot as a kid, especially in jr. high and high school, but it hadn't been a priority for me for some time. At first, I was daunted by the size and space of a blank page. It seemed too big. Too much potential. My drawings in school had mainly been in the margins of textbooks during lectures. I had recently seen a painting by a friend of a Mayan stelae, with it's glyphs laid out in an organic grid, and the answer seemed clear.
I drew a tiny frame in the lower right hand corner of a blank page in a notebook. I think I might have drawn a little circle in it. There was room for little else. Then I drew 3 more boxes around the edges of the first and I filled them in. It took me a few days, but I filled the page with little squares, a tiny illustration inhabiting each one. Oh yeah. Lamont. Basically, on just about every page I drew, there'd be moments when a spontaneous drawing wasn't happening, so I had a few stock images: a circle, a cube, a UFO, a little alien guy, that I'd draw to sort of get the juices flowing. The little alien guy was almost a little puppet: a tube with a head on top with a couple of eyes, like a stick figure with a little meat on it's bone. Every time I drew this little guy, the name "Lamont" would pop into my head. Like from out of nowhere. I told a friend this story and she just stated the obvious: "Oh, yeah. That's that little guy's name. That's Lamont."
As I continued drawing, a story emerged: Lamont was a Transdimensional Systems Analyst, a meme-being from out-of-time-and-space. The squares i was drawing were a graphic datastream he recieved and sort of channeled out through my hand for observation, analysis, and system enhancement. A couple of years later, I had filled my first sketchbook, sold my first drawings, published a couple of zines, and was wined and dines by the rich and famous.
So that's the origin of Lamont. His story is ongoing, and the drawings keep coming. More on this, I'm sure.
