my art desk sits empty, for the most part. more realistically it accumulates miscellaneous stuff--school notes, a coffee mug, a snack--i try to clean it weekly as a ritual to remind myself that i might draw someday. I feel that I ran out of things to say a while ago and I engage in visual craft on an as-needed basis (to accompany a music release, mostly, which isn't very often).
when you quit something "vocationally" and sever the feedback loops, not a lot is left to hook you in to desire the process. The vocational study, of course, squeezes out the joy and freedom of exploration, if you let it. When I did, it left a half-trained vocabulary that indicates that I can sort-of reproduce images and sort-of reach at abstractions that please me. There's a rift between these two things that I'm left lost on how to reconcile.
The desire never travels into full view. I can't remember the last time I've worked on anything for more than an hour a day.
a hypomanic outlet
dissociation
control in any environment that lacked it
an attempt at being valued
communication
Increasing insistence on the idea that reduction of ambiguity must happen on one's own terms. Failure of an artwork to read with a specific audience is not necessarily a failure of the artwork.
jury duty selection waiting room (zoom conference). drawing a series of circles evolving into a bigger shape, to occupy time. staring at an array of faces on the computer, none of which wanted to be there.
"staff day" work event. as guest speakers did their thing, I took notes extremely verbosely and drew trees with small sections indicating great levels of detail. There was nothing more important in that moment than keeping my hands busy.
scraping the depths of depression and curving back. an act of trying to remember what it felt like to draw something, because it seemed meaningful at the time. laying catatonically for a week and punctuating that time by grabbing the biggest piece of paper I can find.
being subject to the opposite side of drawing and feeling the need to retain "identity". class exercises leaving me with a feeling that my work wasn't mine. making ridiculous artistic compromises to meet due dates, letting the pen act itself out on paper as an apology.
High school art classroom - a desperate need to make the outburst of energy worth something. Drawing for hours and hours until my wrists hurt, because nothing else was going to make me feel like myself.
I want to be remembered, still. I'm wondering why that still is.
Part of what led me to the sort of ink work I do is how strangely GAN networks handled image generation back in the mid 2010's. Every line and silhouette uncertain of itself, barely beginning to hone in on a subject matter rather than making a pass at depiction. Every other worry I read on image generation focuses on the inevitability of unambiguous depiction: the day AI "gets hands right", places characters on model, the day the shimmering artifacts disappear.
I'm obsessed with the fault lines. I'm obsessed with the fundamental estrangement of the subject matter from the lens it is being perceived in--the inability to make meaning, the visual frustration and blurring. The art I make needs to be wrong, ambiguous, separated, to become real to me.
the feeling present in the worst of my sensory overload overcomes me at the prospect of drawing: i don't actually want to look at things. i don't want to see an icon, a rendition, a depiction. i want to tear it all apart with my eyes, a pen, reduce it into a series of textures that soothe for their own sake.
I've been thinking a lot about the way these perceptions are rendered in Raúl Nieto Guridi's children's book "it's so difficult" -- the feeling that attempting to observe reality is almost physically painful. I picked this book off of a shelf during a particulary bad day: Any of the other books I shelved were dizzying and difficult to look at, but this one stopped me in my tracks because it understood exactly where I was. It presents sensory overload as a valid artistic lens, something that I generally try to put away because trying to work within it is almost impossible. It's been a blind spot for me--most of the art I know along this contingency has more to do with exactly what overwhelms or soothes the senses, rather than depicting the pain itself at a bare perceptual level.
Playing Shadow of the Colossus at various points in my life. understanding that any landscape blurred the mediums most common purpose for environment - to draw detail towards where you are supposed to go. it's especially easy to make an example out of this because of the attempt made at reducing its ambiguities and rough edges as a display of technology through remaking.
cherishing the moments of reading The Left Hand of Darkness and realizing that my visual-thinking brain didn't suffice at all for realizing any of the characters.
a certain feeling: that i need to do this for myself, but the world i have access to is severed from art.
the obvious: everything good finds itself algorithm-subsumed.
long ago i accepted myself as an "internet citizen" - no matter what I did, most of it would be subject to those translation processes and viewed in a different medium than intended. nowadays i feel a lot more strongly about this. I actually remember the paintings that I see in a gallery, whereas on the internet I have to force myself to take things seriously (by saving images, taking notes). it makes me sad that space capable of unfolding from any point but product comes in such scarce supply around here / these days.