I carried Touching from a Distance around in my backpack for most of my senior year of high school, and even I don’t think this needs to exist.
It’s been two or three years since I last did the Index-Card-a-Day challenge, but since I’ve been meaning to do more watercolor sketching, I decided to try it this year with time limits on how long I spend per card.
Research rabbit holes: I had to look up the name of a mapmaking tool for a character who is an amateur cartographer, and now I, too, am an amateur cartographer.
I tend to make these poems spontaneously, and find meaning after the fact. To me, this is about imagination, which is absolutely a space beneath sight.
Developing film
Soapmaking
Printmaking
This list is the intersection of:
Art forms that sound awesome and
Art forms that have caustic chemicals and
Art forms that I will not try due to anxiety.
The other day I wrote about how I ended up with a love triangle in Stars Fall Out–something that surprised me (but shouldn’t have) and made me suspicious, as I’m not typically one for romantic storylines.
There’s also another love triangle, and that’s me two-timing Stars Fall Out with its sequel, Bitter Machines.
And there’s a third one, which is me making a love triangle diagram instead of working on either book.
And a fourth one, in which I’m in a relationship with a human being and run away to my office to do all of the above.
Sometimes it’s a stay-up-until-1:00-a.m.-making-a-collage kind of depression. I had an old magazine lying around with an ad for neck cream. It said, “You’re only as young as your neck.”
I mean, yeah? My neck is the same age as the rest of me.
If I ever mention “going through a pack a day,” it will probably be in reference to index cards. I keep finding more uses for them.
I’m not interested in the texture of a rock, but in its shadow.
–Ellsworth Kelly
This resonated with my mostly because of my main character in Stars Fall Out, a failed printmaker whose tendency to see the light and shadow in everything ends up revealing something important about a newly-engineered magic.
My drawings have to be quick. If they don’t happen in 20 minutes or a half hour, then they’re no good.
–Ellsworth Kelly
I discovered the same thing a few months ago when I started setting time limits for myself just so I would draw more. Longer drawing times equal stilted drawings.
Lying about… artist Ellsworth Kelly
When I bought Ellsworth Kelly stamps at the post office, I lied and pretended I knew who he was. The clerk expressed his surprise that they’d put out the Kelly stamps so quickly–he’d died fairly recently.
“Oh, that’s true,” I said.
In college, the teachings of Socrates inspired me to stop pretending I knew things in order to look smarter. Instead, I decided to just ask. I might look ignorant, but it would be better for me in the long term.
Asking is better than looking something up online later; you get a human perspective that’s missing from Wikipedia. Sometimes, also, you realize that other people don’t always know what they’re talking about.
Since I didn’t ask the clerk, I had to look up Ellsworth Kelly myself.
Kelly led a long life, made tons of art, and passed away in 2015. The single awesomest thing I learned about him? He was part of a WWII unit called “The Ghost Army,” which deceived the Germans into thinking there were allied armies where there were none. PBS made a documentary about it–I know the next documentary I’m watching.