Toc Fetch: Statement and Bio

Kids of Lower Utopia - Vol. 6 No3 - Letters from the Front Lines (Statement / Synopsis)

In this series of drawings - this book, I am drawing a sequential 55 page story. Each page measures 30" x 50", and all are done primarily with a .3 mec-pencil on paper. In this, my 8th book I am drawing, through the lens of Zen Non-dualism, an allegorical dream in which my heroine; River Scout Finnagain, travels through archetypal stages of realizations to finally arrive at her Self.

This story couldn't be told better in another medium (nothing holds more directly the silent life of observation-in-light as a metaphor undisguised) then the pencil. My drawings are spoken in a careful language of conscious vectors summing into "still-points" where life's attention waits gathering silence.

My pages are a sequence of images in a formal proximity that initiates a narrative (inductive-deductive) flow which solicits from the viewer intuitive leaps to bridge the space between pages - leaps through their own non-linear space of Self.

Art is a metaphor for being fully conscious, it mimics Self-Realization by seeing so thoroughly, so seemingly instantaneously "Now" that the viewer is suspended in "Aesthetic Arrest" and experiences observation free of thought. This is my Work.

The Single Songs of Schizotopia. V7.1. An Anthology of Lower Utopia (Statement / Synopsis)

This book will be volume 7 of The Most Pope Joey. It is made from a collection of single page comics that in their original format combine digital-ink and pencil-drawing – all pages measuring 26” x 40”.

A collection of tongue-in-cheek sutras under the influence of humor from a place in the Heart called Lower Utopia. Lower Utopia is a name for the place that is the most inward edge of the Image Nation within (of which the last and farthest city on the frontier of the Total-Unknown-Universe is called Schizotopia -- because There - everyone is You). In the country of Lower Utopia and in the city of Schizotopia where all the art in the world is made, the people live in love with Love and practice Love on everything. The deeper you go into Lower Utopia the closer all the different stories become. Closer to being the One story about recognizing the Sacred within until It is without.

This book is about the sweet self mockery of a worker in consciousness (living in a transitional time when the world is choosing between planetary annihilation and inner peace). These pages are a series of softly comic spiritually surreal metaphors that present the juxtaposition of the inner in the outer world.

Through the eyes of an animal the sacred and realized awareness of the universe watches us and waits. An animal is its very function, it is the perfect answer to its niche - its form is the very shape of its exact needs as sculpted by a million years of evolution. It is beauty. Animals are ambassadors from that vast ineffable nature which is our very nature as well.

It is our own ego that blocks us from experiencing that sacred awareness of nature that looks back at us through the eyes of an animal. It is this realization that is the essential statement of our work. We create shrines to these holy beings we love - for those who love them as well.

Exiles in Lower Utopia - Tricia Cline - Toc Fetch (Our mutual statement)

We are telling the story of the Hero’s pilgrimage into the Self. Certainly, all stories, by virtue of being a story, are metaphors of the inner life. Metaphors and Allegories are a kind of sign-language of the deep subconscious or what we term: the Self. The Self speaks to us in the language of images, dreams, feelings, inspirations, metaphors, and the extended metaphor of allegory.

We work only in the most elemental of materials - simple graphite and clay, anything more is non-essential to a Direct Observation – the simplest direct experience. We solicit the most precise voice of these elemental materials in order to articulate consciousness as it echoes through the metaphor that is Form, and all this as the subtext of the Real (our direct observation of the Real). Our images come out of a mutual allegory in which the emphasis is on what is inwardly Real.

Our story then is a metaphor for the pilgrimage inward. Our work, as we feel it instinctually, is to offer all that reaffirms life, feeds life, all that makes this hell-of-a-world a heaven. It is the Hero’s story because there is nothing harder in this world then to become your Self. It is the simplest thing and the hardest. And, once you realize the sublime existence of the Self you become an Exile from this world searching for your way home. The way home is Inward.

Utopia is another metaphor for the Self. The word Utopia, means ‘not-a-place’ or ‘no-place,’ Utopia only exists within the timeless no-place of the Self. And Lower Utopia is its border lands.

The deeper you go into Lower Utopia the closer all the different stories become, closer to being the One story about recognizing the Sacred within until It is without.

Art is a metaphor about being fully conscious, seeing through to the Real. Art mimics Self-Realization in that it sees its subject so thoroughly, and yet presents it as so instantaneous, that the viewer is suspended in the very Awareness of the work, which is their own Awareness, (the actual object of the work is just a glass for the water of perception) — the viewer is suspended without question, without desire, without fear, in the very Now - Aesthetic Arrest (as Steven Dedalus defined it by way of James Joyce). The art work presents a language of perception in which every utterance is as close as possible to being absolutely necessary. The result is experienced as an effortless Direct-Observation, in which all things within its frame of reference are intelligent with life.

We work until we feel the transcendent awake and sentient in the Image. That is the work. The story then comes out of the works as feelings of realizations strung together by time in which there is no Real set beginning or end, only these epiphanies in which all of life is heroic.

Toc's Bio

Toc was born in Brooklyn in 1953. Since his father was a painter he grew up with art.

“I have been obsessed with making art longer than I can remember, or so I’m told.”

After serving a year in RISD in 1973, he knew that what he needed was not more schooling, what he needed was to understand his self—the primary tool of the work. So he began to study and practice the discipline of (Zen) Non-dualism in Europe and the US for the next 10 years while making art.

In 1989, the toxic nature of oil painting led to a year of cancer. During that year Toc came close to death and studied life from that perspective. That time away from the world opened revelations about the nature of comic books and the virtually untapped possibilities inherent in that medium as art. In 1990 he moved back to NY and began making comics.

By his third comic he came to the attention of Roger Ricco of the Ricco/Maresca Gallery in NYC. On September 13, 2001, Toc had his first one man show at the Ricco/Maresca Gallery —a story told in 11 pages (each 30" x 50"), drawn in pencil on paper, two days after the towers fell (“The timing felt like a mythic wink”).

Toc has published six graphic novels. He is the only one to have ever received two Xeric Foundation grants to publish. One of his books has been translated and published in France by L'association, Paris.

Toc has been working for the last six years on his eighth book and has been showing the pages with sculptor Tricia Cline (also of Ricco/Maresca Gallery) who he works with very closely and whose images and experiences come from the same Non-dualist allegory.

In this 55-page story of sequential images which are 30" x 50", .3 mec-pencil on paper, Toc is attempting to draw every impossible thing he can see inside as well as out.