It’s July. It’s been hot. Not super hot; I live in Portland, ME. It is hotter, pretty much everywhere than it is here. Perhaps not, but it has been super warm. I’ve determined that introspection is the mother of second guessing. I’ve also determined that being amongst people, even talking to said people, doesn’t necessarily equate to being an extrovert. In fact, I’ve been thinking a lot about the phrase: “alone in a crowd.” To sit and draw and reflect on the people around you, even to give them pictures, to smile and joke, to laugh uproariously, this isn’t really being an extrovert. If you want to know what I think, steal a sketchbook. Everything that I am is in my sketchbooks. Everything I understand, and everything that I can’t wrap my head around. It’s in the sketchbook. When I have a bad week, it’s in there, disguised as cute furry creatures loving one another, one magnificent world of coping. It’s all so small, trivial. Thoughts built upon thoughts. None of them take up much space, but when you add page to page, day after day, it starts to build up, and you realize that you are a sum of billions of moments in this life, positive and negative, all added to each other and making you, for the better or for the worse.
I bring this up because I realize that when I take work from the intimate arena of a sketchbook to a mural or a large installation it is like amplifying my thoughts. The introvert becomes the extrovert in one fell swoop. What is it too, to see thoughts amplified at this scale? Is it egotistical? I wonder what this desire to see my work so large is. It is probably in reaction to feeling ignored as a kid. Well if that’s it, “Ignore this!”
This project has been pretty great. I have been going through some awkward social business this week and it has been incredibly cathartic learning to cross hatch with a paint brush. Cross hatching to me is like feeling the crash of the surf; an ebb and a flow where in the ultimate rhythm of life is felt.
Heaven essentially.
Peace
-Mike