there are a few themes running through my piles of old sketches. this is probably the case with most artists. we each have our crutches and our passions. ideas that occupy our minds in stretched-out phases. for a while I drew anything and everything with little bite-mark indentations. and of course there were dozens and dozens of mermaids, princesses, and fairies. in a hundred old school notebook margins there is a version of this sad little torn up lily:
part of me once thought this composition dreadfully clever. maybe it is. was. maybe.
a few years later (not that I catalog my sketches by date. that would be far too organized a thing to do.) we come across a lot of this scribbled advice:
I am still not sure what I so much needed to let go of. probably several things.
Let go became sort of a mantra for a while--my little wounded insides stretching towards some kind of Buddhist detachment. sometimes I still go back to this thought, wishing for more control. perhaps I haven't truly let go of anything yet.
the other thing is hearts. easy. iconic. a little bit evocative... and also really cliché. but I found so many hearts, and so many different ideas connected to them, I decided
to make a collection. here's one of the fifty-two:
fifty-two hearts, carved out of the pages and pages of no-longer-blank paper that fill a couple of manila folders in a box in my closet, photographed and plastered upon the internet. I wonder what else I could do with them. none of them match. they all seem to come from separate pieces of myself. how strangely ironic.
{ for the record, I catalog my sketches according to the size of paper they are sketched on. the largest ones at the bottom, the tiniest ones paper-clipped in bunches at the top. }
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