Well, wouldn't you know it. Just as I start to get back into the rhythm of posting here on a regular schedule, my old, tired, limping computer finally called it quits. Not a surprise, but a bit inconvenient at the moment. So, please forgive the poor quality of the images that follow. They're the best I could manage with my phone. OK, embarrassment assuaged, let's get into my eye-opening plunge into sketchbooks of years past.
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| sketchbook notes, 1999 |
This week, my friend Albert and I have been trying to remember all the art museums we have visited together. We've come up with 33 we agree upon. This fun trip down memory lane inspired me to list all the other art museums and galleries I have visited, ever. Which led to my bookshelf of old sketchbooks, to jog my memory. I was floored to discover the above page from 1999.
The words that fold over the right side into the gutter read:
"memory of past strength/power, goddess, nature, blood past, history, hanging seed pod/vulva"
I have absolutely no recollection of this. None. I cannot remember contemplating seed pods as vulvas before this past year. And that sketch in the center, I now recall, is a partitioned drawer that I used to have. I obviously was thinking about lining it with fur and turning it into a wall-hanging shadow box, to contain a hanging seed pod vulva and a small box holding "single vulva/pod."
What absolutely blows me away about this is not that I completely forgot these notes, but that I have been thinking that I am currently embarking on new artistic ground for myself. (See this post) Hah! Not so. I am right in line with what has always motivated my art making. Only now I am actually following through on the shadow box idea and the vulva pod idea. As the following 2019 sketchbook page shows.
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| sketchbook notes, 2019 |
I find it interesting and reassuring, comforting even, that when we feel like our creative voice has become unfamiliar, like we're learning a foreign language, that we're actually mining what has always existed within us. The notions that seem new or crazy or coming out of left field, they only feel that way because we are newly learning to express them. The ideas themselves are old ideas that have been biding their time, waiting for the right time for our creative selves to be able to fully realize them. Or so I believe.
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| sketchbook, 1999 |
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| sketchbook, 2018 |
One more comparison I can't resist sharing:
from 1999: "create symbol for female/goddess/strength/power, reproduce 3-dimensionally" and a tattoo sketch, in the inverted triangle, sacred symbol of feminine creative power/yoni (which little tidbit I definitely did not know at the time). Followed by a page from 2019, doodling symbols that represent exactly what I charged myself to create (and promptly forgot about) 20 years ago.
from 1999: "create symbol for female/goddess/strength/power, reproduce 3-dimensionally" and a tattoo sketch, in the inverted triangle, sacred symbol of feminine creative power/yoni (which little tidbit I definitely did not know at the time). Followed by a page from 2019, doodling symbols that represent exactly what I charged myself to create (and promptly forgot about) 20 years ago.
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| sketchbook, 1999 |
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| sketchbook, 2019 |
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