By Susan Viguers
Shandy Press, 2023, edition size 15.
5 x 6"; 28 pages. Hand sewn binding. Cloth spine with illustrated paper of eco prints over boards. Signed and numbered by the artist.
Colophon: “Conceived, the text drafted, and most of the self-portrait images drawn during an In Cahoots residency, August of 2022. The portraits are blind contour drawings … The color fields were hand stenciled. The text and images were letterpress printed using polymer plates. The typeface is Adobe Garamond Pro. The paper is Schiller.”
Susan Viguers: “’The Thing Is, You Guys’ explores the experience of aging – embarrassing, painful, sad, comical. The brief narratives are presented in the context of blind contour self-portraits and a dirge sung by the author/artist in her childhood, ‘When you ever see a hearse go by’. … The dirge is a ‘song’ – as I remember it from my childhood – which we sang when we saw a hearse drive by.”
A delightful and insightful look at aging. Across the bottom of the pages dance the musical notations from the song “When you ever see a hearse go by remember that some day you’re going to die.” And, so the song continues across the bottom of the pages while the text above reveals the thoughts of one who is realizing that they are aging and the hearse may be coming sooner than later.
Viguers starts her narrative with
              The thing is, you guys, you grow old,
              But you don’t think you’re old.
                                  THAT’s the problem.
Through the vignettes little nuggets of realization come through such as “My memory is porous, and I no longer trust it” and “We witness dying from the outside.”