Well, that was fun: two years effort and mistakes made the big public debut last night at Archival Framing, alongside 5 fabulous paintings by Pete Wedel. I admire him because he’s always known what he was setting out to do: I’m having a crisis of faith this morning, the melancholy that comes with the day after – Christmas, birthday, Hallowe’en, any of those events with great anticipation beforehand seem to leave gaping holes in the aftermath. But I was talking about Pete: the man can draw, which I have been too hurried to master, and now I am going back and learning the basics (it’s about time!) and I’m loving it. There is something simply and completely satisfying about mastering the elements of a craft.
I’m also plotting approaches to my next series. I’m thinking on several different levels: I want to do an alphabet, which lends itself to either pages or a poster (possibly both?), but pages would point toward looking back at book arts again, and the cycle of creation takes off all over again…I think I may try working with color this time out, too, which may not sound like a big challenge, but I’ve been reducing things to black-white –and-texture for fifteen years now, using the width of the line to provide visual variety, and I don’t know what I will think of switching over to color, instead: is that a short-cut, or does it broaden the horizon and bring new dragons to be slain into the picture?
