Light Left On

By Cuyler Keating. Self Published. 

Softcover, 24 pages, Colour, 2021.

Light Left On is a short anthology collection by Cuyler Keating. The collection contains three comics, each completed during the pandemic, written in poetic style and printed in full-color. Each comic focuses, in ways both overt and oblique, on the home as the place where our wants and our hurts live closest to us, especially when our orbit shrinks to just inside our doorstep.

March 19th, 2020 was drawn in the early days of the pandemic and is a perseveration on those early feelings of uncertainty, claustrophobia, and fear. It was drawn in colored pencil and was previously featured on The Center for Cartoon Studies’ Instagram during their “Drawing On Isolation” series.

Worn Down was made using a combination of colored pencil and watercolor. Using woodworking as a central metaphor, it focuses on the comfort in the familiar and the patterns we wear into our relationships with each other.

Room From the Road is the last in the collection. Drawn using pastel pencils, it is a rumination on the small joys and small pains inherent to the work of daily life, especially when cultivating happiness can feel itself like a form of labor.

The series was started in one apartment and finished in another as the author moved on the first day of 2021, with all the weighty expectations that a new year brings travelling with her. Light Left On is an attempt to acknowledge all those hopes, fears, and wants, both to herself and to those who choose to read it.

Honors
Winner, 2021 MICE Mini-Grant