Jess looked at this drawing on the board today and told me that it looked like my work. She said it as a compliment (I think), but I flinched, inwardly saying “fuck… that can’t be good.”
While trying to improve our work, is there a goal running parallel to this? A goal that reasons that if the work is improving, we are improving as well? So if a drawing looks like something I made, it’s assumed that it’s recognizable by my limitations and habitual approach to vision, composition, and mark making. There’s a large part of me that wants to be able to make drawings that pretend that they aren’t me, that pretend to be grander, more eloquent, and more beautiful. It’s this want that keeps me showing up everyday just to try again and again, the irony is that in the meantime, the more I show up, the more and more I become comfortable with myself. While what I can’t do defines what I can do, it’s what I’m doing that’s recognizable as me.
ps. I’ve wanted to use that vase in a project of some kind for years. It’s one of Jess’s that I pulled from the bin during one of her bouts of censorship of her work. I like the drawing just because it’s in there.
Zygote Blum 