A word is elegy to what it signifies
I’ve had no time to think about words lately. I’ve been spending every waking minute, and the majority of my sleeping minutes thinking about my drawings. The creative process is a strange animal, and one that I still can’t really wrap my mind around. I have been waiting for weeks, making drawings, greasing lithography plates and wiping down etchings, just waiting to turn a corner in the body of work I am putting together. In my mind I knew that I had to keep making bad drawings to get to the good ones, but I haven’t tried to wrestle and pin a conceptual idea down to paper since my BFA thesis. The ambiguity was beginning to weigh me down.
I’ve had a hard time translating words lately because I’ve been so invested in the weight of the lines I am making and figuring out why I am committed to a certain color palette, why I want to keep drawing the same shapes, and when it is a good time to stop asking questions and just put it down. The effort of stringing words together as they chase after experience is something that I’ve been obsessed with for quite a while. When I first read Robert Hass’s Meditation at Lagunitas I was struck by the clarity of his words—the way he articulated and made shape of something that had always been slightly out of reach for me—
because there is in this world no one thing
to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds,
a word is elegy to what it signifies.
I’ve been able to take a few deep breaths lately, because I think I’ve turned that corner. Suddenly my marks are making sense, and while I certainly don’t think I’m going to change the world with my drawings, and I’m not even sure other people should be spending time with them, I’m happy that I’ve found a familiar yet ambiguous visual vocabulary again.
On my train ride home from work today I reread a Dave Hickey essay, and I found myself again happily in the middle of this dialog; feeling the inadequacy of words—
…even though a visible artifact must necessarily predate the language that described it, the artifact itself, as we stand before it, is always newer and more extensive than any word every written about it—newer and more extensive, even, than the visual codes incorporated into it, because whether we like it or not, we always confront works of art as part of that selfless, otherless, unwrittable instant of ordinary experience.
Right now, I am living for this unwrittable ambiguity.
I’ve had a hard time translating words lately because I’ve been so invested in the weight of the lines I am making and figuring out why I am committed to a certain color palette, why I want to keep drawing the same shapes, and when it is a good time to stop asking questions and just put it down. The effort of stringing words together as they chase after experience is something that I’ve been obsessed with for quite a while. When I first read Robert Hass’s Meditation at Lagunitas I was struck by the clarity of his words—the way he articulated and made shape of something that had always been slightly out of reach for me—
because there is in this world no one thing
to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds,
a word is elegy to what it signifies.
I’ve been able to take a few deep breaths lately, because I think I’ve turned that corner. Suddenly my marks are making sense, and while I certainly don’t think I’m going to change the world with my drawings, and I’m not even sure other people should be spending time with them, I’m happy that I’ve found a familiar yet ambiguous visual vocabulary again.
On my train ride home from work today I reread a Dave Hickey essay, and I found myself again happily in the middle of this dialog; feeling the inadequacy of words—
…even though a visible artifact must necessarily predate the language that described it, the artifact itself, as we stand before it, is always newer and more extensive than any word every written about it—newer and more extensive, even, than the visual codes incorporated into it, because whether we like it or not, we always confront works of art as part of that selfless, otherless, unwrittable instant of ordinary experience.
Right now, I am living for this unwrittable ambiguity.
posted by Rebecca at 5:57 PM
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