Yesterday’s drawing…
…always looks slightly strange to me. Alien. The things I’ve made contain memory, sure, but it’s not released in the way that might seem logical. I can remember certain things about drawing, while I’m drawing, and not otherwise. A memory that resides in the hand, not the eye. So scanning what I’ve done is always a surprise.
Similarly with writing: I revisit things from years ago and can’t believe that I was able to put the words together, even though I remember the particulars of sweating it out, the strain of writing, or rather the strain of not writing, of trying to force the confrontation with the computer screen. That memory comes easily, but the fact that I got something done and that this is the sequence of words that arose? It seems far fetched.
I’ve been going over the drawings I’ve made here and a bunch of journal entries that I’m adding tags to and the effect is far from flipping through a scrap book. I’m often perplexed. And that is why the cultivation of these habits is so important. The memory that resides in the hand, the ability to connect one day’s thought to the next through making certain gestures that lead to marks, that daily caress is the first thing to disappear in my usual daily assault of media consumption.
I wrote last month about needing a blank space to project work into, and earlier this month about needing a cascade of images to prime the pump. Here’s another ting I need to get to my true working place, the daily feedback of limber up, move the pencil, start again lines and choices about lines catching thought, moving thought forward in the ways that eyes can’t on their own. When that is happening every day, the drawings can go deeper and become fuller. The next day’s surprise is that much more welcome. When the gap is too long, that gap simply becomes a measure of how alienated I’ve become from my own process.
That’s three needs, and I’m sure that are others. They are not unreasonable things to ask of myself. And not hard things to provide. The reminder that they are there, and that they don’t go away, the laying bare of what’s required, truly, for me to do this thing, that’s the most important outcome of this month. I’m setting this down so that It can serve as a refuge and an accusation to me when I lose the way.
Tags: artists' retreats, daily photo, drawing, making art, notes on practice, self portrait