Hello! I’m starting a monthly print club benefit for paid subscribers. The first print will be a 5x7 copy of the collage posted below. Future prints will feature my drawings, paintings or other collages. If you upgrade to paid, you will receive an email with a link a form to collect your mailing address.
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I recently noticed that the words I spoke seemed to resonate through my body, affecting how lightly I stepped, much like how music sets the rhythm of my stride. The words I have been speaking recently have left me languished. There are difficult personal and global truths to hold. My arms are heavy with them. When these truths remain unexpressed, I am congested with unformed ideas and a general disdain for everything. I feel cranky, irritated, and unsettled. I need lightness, so I’m allowing myself lighter words this week.
The collage above includes a writing exercise from
’s 12-step essay challenge focused on the lyric essay. Participants will engage in activities to explore and capture "shimmers and shards"—brief, vivid observations from the world around them. The exercise emphasizes paying close attention to sensory details without expanding into narrative or analysis.I composed the collage by using words from my writing as keywords in the Met and Smithsonian open access collection search engines. The juxtaposing imagery of ants, butterflies and stained glass certainly evoke something about something. It certain is a metaphor for something, but today I am not concerned with what that something is. Often, when a poetic image is probed for meaning, it will evade us. The analysis we enforce upon it will flatten it’s complexity. It becomes overworked. It’s like when a novice painter mixes too many pigments and produces mud.
I watched the Talking Heads concert film “Stop Making Sense!” on HBO recently. It’s an hour and a half of pure, uninhibited exuberance. It lifted my spirit immensely. I forget how fun and beautiful human beings can be. The title has become a personal mantra for me. “Stop making sense!”—it is quite a practical piece of advice. At a certain point, relationality becomes a futile endeavor. Sometimes we have no choice but to believe in magic.
Pierre Bonnard is one of my favorite painters. He is known for his maximalist interiors, with their undulating brush strokes of warm and cool colors. He often worked on his paintings for years, sneaking a small palette into museums and collectors homes after their selling. He never considered his paintings done, and I find that I work very much the same. There is this fear I have of finishing something. Of calling it done. This painting of ants must be the quietest picture that Bonnard made. I wonder what made him look upon this colony of ants and decide, in this moment, that it was better to say less?