the summer before i went to Italy in 1999 i took a print making class and in it, was a guy that talked about trying to not let his art become to precious. i was so confused by the motivation to make art that's not precious i was offended by it. i stopped wanting to know that guy, i didn't even want to be his friend. I was so deeply in a stage of trying to find or invent my own preciousness with my art.
what amazes me about this time is how much art i made that i am still inspired by.
because now i understand. the preciousness gets in the way. the blank page wins when the sketch book itself is what's precious.
if you're out there guy from summer printmaking cont. ed, i'm sorry. i'm gonna try your approach and let the pages get messy. not so precious. they are just pages. maybe they don't want to be blank anymore.
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Several months ago I bought a cute, soft, mole-skinned notebook from the journal section of Powell's. Just a simple un-adorned black book with unlined pages. I had the singularly humble plan of writing notes in it. Simple notes, things like meeting notes from various programming groups I go to, words I need to look up from books I read (the King of Elfland's Daughter, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norell, etc etc), reminders, recipes. Nothing grand or fancy. I've carried that notebook with me everywhere, ever since.
Unmarked.
It's too precious. Anything I could put in it would violate its purely potential beauty. My words are clumsy and my hand-writing, at its best, is legible not lovely.
I write with a Namiki Falcon filled with Noodler's Tiananmen Square Red. It seems spilling carmine characters across the leaves would be an un-doable act of pollice verso.
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