Subconscious re-runs
Future me in conversation with past me.
Prologue:
Over the winter holiday break I had some time off work and instead of lazing around, I finally cracked the seal on excavating a large number of boxes we’d been storing for an embarrassing number of years. We moved into our current house 2.5 years ago, and as we unpacked the final van load and settled in, my wife immediately began grad school. This halted any energy to get rid of all those boxes we didn’t have time to look through before we moved. Long story short, I’m excellent at creating stacks and piles of things, and very bad at sifting through, and getting rid of, said stacks and piles of things.
SO, as a gift to my wife and my future self, I started the new year right and eliminated dozens of cardboard boxes and plastic tubs full of everything from old artwork and desk items from past jobs, to dead media and random cleaning supplies from the move. Among the anthropological artifacts were several bins containing items from my childhood: school papers, photos, yearbooks, and all kinds of collected paraphernalia that had meaning at one point, but now had the musty film of time coating its browned edges.
The plot thickens
One box contained several of my 3-ring binders from middle and high school. They were a canvas for the kind of densely-packed imagery and cultural references you’d expect from any teenager who’s mind tended to drift during 3rd period algebra.
Seeing my own doodles from the late 80s and early 90s may not have been as interesting to me just a few years ago. But recently my art practice had started to remind me of the kind of layered visual language “I thought I remembered” existing on my high school binders. Simple images and a lot of text all scribbled out by a quick hand. And now that memory was sitting here IRL.
So was my memory accurate? Had I recently been conjuring up some long-dormant, psychic-teenage-image-lexicon? Was I drawing things I had already used in the past? Did any of my old images look like they were made with the same hand?
Mmmm, kinda?
Did the drawings reflect the headspace of the maker? Yes. And it hasn’t changed that much. I still think about music, skateboarding and girls. I mean… what else is there?
I also found repeated geometric shapes, cubes, and pyramid structures jammed within densely packed text, scribbles, religious references, and random marks. These are all things that still find there way into my work, albeit in a bit more considered compositions.
Another trait I recognized was a lack of interest in detail. Or maybe it was a lack of patience? Other than a solid drawing of Spider-man, making formally recognizable pictures seems to have always taken a back seat to ideas. I still don’t have much interest in drawing “properly.” Whatever that is. I can do it (see aforementioned Spider-man). But to this day, thoughts and ideas always win out over detail.
It is reassuring to see consistency and commitment to a way of processing the world I inhabit through pictures and text. I’m a little more clever now - mmm-barely. Ideologically-speaking I am much more confident and relaxed in my uncertainty.
Ultimately visual art, intentional or otherwise, is a negotiation between thinking and materials. My teenage self didn’t know this yet, but he was deep in this negotiation. More than any formal art training I’ve received, this direct and fundamental aspect of image making remains unchanged for me. If you want to know about me, just look at my art. It is the graffiti of my sub-conscious.
Bonus round: Original art at rock-bottom prices
Just a friendly, neighborhood reminder that I have affordable artwork for sale in my shop. Use this code through the month of April to get 10% off on all original work: LOLART666
