Maria Sweeney is a Moldova-born, New Jersey-based freelance illustrator and comic artist. She graduated magma cum laude from Moore College of Art and Design with a BFA in Illustration. She has worked extensively in digital, oils, watercolors, and other traditional mediums. Aside from comissions and illustrating her current project, In A Rut Comics, she writes and self-publishes comics relating to living with a rare disability.
methinks….people underestimate how makeup is an actual real psychological trauma and im not being hyperbolic. being incapable of seeing your bare face in the mirror w/o being shook to your core and spiralling into a chain of negative emotions that ruins the rest of ur day? viscerally fearing being observed w/o makeup so much it informs how and when and IF you dare to move in public spaces? how many women fear intimate relationships bc they cant stomach the thought of someone seeing them w/o makeup? being so alienated from your own body that either exposing it or being exposed to it renders u depressed disturbed and disgusted sounds like textbook trauma responses to me
i’ve been obsessed, lately, with the way we say things. how sometimes you hear the great northeast in the clip of my “course” and the back-of-the-mouth “roof.” about how i find out little bits about where you grew up just from the way you slide through “news.”
our bodies splayed on the floor of my room. i open the book i’m writing about you and say how do you say this and i point to hedonist.
you say head-on-ist.
i say it’s heed-on-ist.
you say you heathen and i’m struck by the smile on you.
i scoop up water in my palms and watch it run out. is it in-sure-unce or in-sure-ance.
in-sure-ance. your hair is catching the sun. i watch your mouth move around the syllables like syrup.
we’re outside and i point up. is that a firefly or a lightning bug?
“Joan of Arc, without tomb and without portrait, you who knew that the grave of heroes is the heart of the living.”
— André Malraux quoted by Mary Gordon in Joan of Arc: A Life original: Jean d’Arc, sans sepulchre et sans portrait, toi qui savais que le tombeau des heros est le coeur des vivants. (via girlwithouthands)
