Beginning With Intention

Or, what the heck am I doing???

Hello from my dinky hotel room on a cold, very wet afternoon in Paris. This is not how I intended to spend these few hours, but I needed to dry out and warm up for a bit, so I’m thinking about how I can put my time on residency to best use.

Before I left home, I took a morning to look through my sketchbooks from the past few years to see if I could identify any themes, common marks, or even ideas that I may have had and forgotten about (that happens a lot).

I am not a diligent sketchbooker. Even though I know no one else will see them (but here I am, showing them to you!), I often feel like what I do in a sketchbook isn’t “pretty” enough, or of any value. I know this is wrong-headed thinking, but, that’s where I’m at with it. I even tried reframing and calling them “workbooks”, but I couldn’t fool myself. I don’t go to them very often, but I did have seven or eight to look through, and I did find what I was looking for.

Across those years and their pages, I saw myself having made similar marks, lines and shapes. Since most of these sketches had no purpose or intention, they seem to me to be very natural and organically created. I can remember my hand making some of these shapes even when I was a child, doodling in the margins in classrooms.

I tore out the pages that had these common themes so I could lay them all out together and see if I could find a story they might be telling. I saw some precursors to the Botanical Fantasy series I am working on. I saw abstracted figures, and figures blending into the organic botanical shapes. I even found a few cubist type things that have recently been lighting me up.

I don’t have a clear vision of what I’m going to do with all this for the next two weeks, but somehow these all speak to me about expansion and omnidirectional growth, which, I suppose, is a good approach to my spending the next couple weeks in a different country surrounded by other artists from all over the globe.

I’m curious to see what I have to show for it at the end.

As always, I appreciate you reading and commenting, and supporting me in my creative journey. For me, art is all about connecting to other humans through my visual language, so thank you for being a part of that.