I just rediscovered a project that I began in 2017 and never finished. It started with a hard drive that led me to going through old sketchbooks where I found my initial drawings, which ignited me. And I found my notes— the texts I read during the research phase, the texts I noted to read later and hadn’t gotten to yet.
Instantly, I felt it, intrigued once again by my original idea. I must complete this project. I can’t move on to the next thing until I finish this. There’s a sequence of works that I must make, some big and some small, and this one comes next, meaning right now. It is a big project, bigger than anything I have done in a long time. That’s why I drifted away from it. It is actually an overwhelming endeavor. In 2017, I was busy with a job that drained my life away. So I came up with the idea, laid the groundwork, checked out the books from the library, and then left it closed up in a diary.
How strange to be left in a sketch book for so long! What must that feel like? Part of my brain says bad! but another part says maybe it needed to ferment like cheese or mead or miso. But now it is out and it will be released and come alive once again. This is part of the creative process.
I’m thinking a lot about process. Here’s a sample of my current sketchbook (I think this page is from Monday). A lot of the pages look something like this.
Messy. Drawings and writing. Sticky notes. Writing down important things in places that are not my sketchbook so I have to paste/tape them into my sketchbook later (sticky notes help with this).
One of the notes on this page I particularly like reads like this:
TOMORROW IS TODAY.
Tomorrow: BRAND (0)Archiving (1)Outreach (2)
Progress (3)
New Projects (4)Inspiration (5)
It is a schedule for one of my studio days. I roughly, chaotically planned to organize a day around art making— which steps I planned do first, in some order of importance or other. You can see that I didn’t quite follow it. I had an intention and then I went a little wilder because art making is not always like other organized forms of work. That’s a thing I love.
If I had to rewrite that sticky note to be about this other project, the one I found half started in my sketchbook from so many years ago (with done to-dos crossed out already) it would look like this:
2017, TODAY, TOMORROW
Get a job as a preschool teacher and feel love and fear all at once all the time (1)Wander around a library in southeast Portland on a rare day off and stumble across a book about children and animals (2)Read the book (3A) Take Notes (3B) Place library holds on texts you find in the bibliography (3C)Turn those notes and the experiences at the preschool into some idea sketches for a project (4)Put your sketchbook away (5)Let seven years go by (6)While flipping through scans on an old hard drive, find the sketches and Option+drag one image to your desktop (7)Open and close it a few times over the course of a week (8)Unpack your closet looking for your sketchbook from 2017. There are a lot of black 8x11 sketchbooks in there so it will take time (9)Find it (10)Reread your notes (11)Scan in the rest of the sketches (12)Immediately buy the book you once read from the library about children and animals, plus two of the reference texts (13)Start a Google doc for the project (14)Read the two reference texts (15)
Figure out what it is you’re trying to say about children and animals. Is it the same thing you wanted to say seven years ago or has it changed? (16)
Make new and more sketches (17)
Turn them into repeating patterns. You will ideally have 9 or more different patterns at the end (18)
Have the patterns printed on cotton jersey cloth (19)
Sew the garments (20)
Document the project and put it on the internet (21)
Ask some friends and mentors about other ways they bring their artwork into the realm of collaboration with the public world-- a gallery? a product? Other artists must know more about these things (23)
Do the best you can to invite the world to see what you have made (22)
Move on to the next thing (23)
This is not the process trajectory that I would have laid out for myself seven years ago when I dreamt up the project, and it may not even be the one I end up following. I am in the middle of it so I can’t see the end yet. I’ll let you all know how it goes.