One Weekend Left.

That's all the time I have till the show. Plus weeknights, but not a lot of time in any given one. I am pretty sure I will not be done in time at all. In that I'm only 2/3rds of my way through the draft sketch for the first panel... ha ha! And then I'll probably make some more changes! Ah!

However. It's okay. The show is open invite, and last I looked there were quite a lot of people signed up on the bookface. So...I think it's going to be chaotic. And my piece will be delicate... so I'm definitely going to keep working like I could get it done in the next 10 days, but if that doesn't happen, I will be fine with it, since setting it up in a place where it isn't necessarily safe will make me a nervous wreck.

I would rather get finished by August 1st, and have a work that is exactly right, than a hurried piece for the sake of having a piece. Overall it's been such a delight to finally feel things clicking into place this weekend. I feel right in the studio. There's a momentum when I finally drag my butt over, turn off all the internet chatting and phone buzzing, queue up the same old playlist and get to work. Also, the furniture is all being dragged slowly into place, and that's helping.

Untitled Sketch.

And the work itself, the act of making, that is such a high and a terror at the same time. You carve a whole visual world off a blank page, and agonize over where a line should go, and what should happen where and how. It's intense. Especially because my initial images carry a different visual character than the final cuts will- the pencil marks always look so different, so I get all nutty about "oh does this look any good at all?" and then I do the cuts and the method and materials add all this DRAMA, and the piece ends up very differently than it looked during the design phase. The process reminds me of black and white photography where you see the image in color, make a guess, take the shot, hoping that you got all your exposures right, develop the film and then, maybe...maybe it lives the way it existed in your head. 

So here are two sketches. The piece is sort of about water. Or maybe it's about how fish can't describe what water is like. Or maybe it's about the complexity of our participation in the world. Who knows? Something like that, in pictures, with a bit of a japanese woodcut influence.

Preliminary draft sketch, for 3 panel cut paper work.