A week ago I finished a compressed semester of “getting things done.” GTD: the siren that calls us to wrestle all the disparate pieces of our lives into a spreadsheet breakdown that we can manipulate into submission — sometimes luring us onto the rocks of busyness and away from doing what we really want to do.
It’s difficult to get back to listening to myself and working from within. Sometimes when I’m unsure about how to approach the next piece, I find inspiration in digging through my stash of variously decorated papers. The designs are great to look at, but what’s more valuable is that looking at these papers revives a kinetic memory of the me that decorated the papers. I remember what it was like to spread out the papers on the table outside, to cook the paste, to mix up the paint and spread it on the paper and move it around with combs and sponges, to drop ink and watch it spread into lovely patterns, to wait while the ink dries to just this consistency so that I can spread it this much with this tool; to respond to the unexpected combination of these colors, the gestural effect of this mark.
In this digital age, the virtual world is instant, or it is interminable. Click Print and the sheet of paper slides out of the printer in a matter of seconds. Click Movies and schedules for all the movies theaters within x miles appear; click Buy and you’ve got your tickets. By contrast, you can lose hours trying to determine why closing this window crashes that program, or why the background color of this paragraph doesn’t match the background color of that image. Instant or interminable, not much of the outside world intrudes between our brain and our fingers on the keyboard.
Doing art re-forms and reforms my connection to the physical world which digital work can sever. And decorating paper is a good start, much like gestural warm-ups for figure drawing or lettering. I’ll post a couple of examples of what I’ve been doing lately.