I’ve got old journals – the ‘dear diary’ variety – dating back over decades. Of no interest to anyone but occasionally me, I see what me-in-the-past was up to on this day however-many years ago.
At art school I began to keep sketchbooks, filled it with thoughts and plans, doodles and scraps. Mainly visual references and test grounds for techniques and materials. And they’re as rich in memories to me as the purely wordy versions that preceded them.
Last year I experimented with Julia Cameron’s morning pages in an on-again/off-again fashion. Not every morning has the space to accommodate all those words, but a bigger block is that part of me resented the paper it required for long, one-way streams of consciousness that I shouldn’t want to revisit. And the thought of scrawling longhand every last niggle and fuss didn’t sit comfortably either. I get the ‘better out than in’ motive. But I didn’t want to hold volumes of this in my life thought; that seemed to be merely displacing it from my head to another place of permanence.
Three things about things I do in books.
Without much connection beyond my voracious consumption of stationery.
Until I read this blog post by Deanna Jinjoe where she speaks of the power of transformation in burying words, thoughts, sentiments into the soul of our art we can transform them into a new beauty.
So the art journal I’m working through now is starting to embody this essence. With traces of the therapeutic brain dumps that keep my mind clear, intertwined with the doodles and splatterings of colour that keep my spirit buoyant.
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Mixy's Art Blog 
Thank you for this reminder. I was just practicing a method similar to this this morning for the first time. It is def very therapeutic.
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Another wonderful post. I write on my work but this gives me the inspiration to get back to it. Thank you for that.
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I like this concept, and what you are making looks and feels marvelous Eph…I’ve always loved your text based works.
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Thanks my friend. I’ve got a sense of loose ends coming together through my art right now. I’m glad/blessed to have got the time to pour into it while the ideas are ripe!
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I like the combination of the past verbal tangles which are not really meant to be seen being buried under layers of freedom from the present. And the results look good too!
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That’s a fantastic idea to paint in between the spaces of your words.
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I like this on different levels – often the words are a brain dump, they aren’t anything significant or interesting to read back in the future so it takes the meaning out of the words. Also you get some cool and interesting shapes from the negative spaces. I remember doing an exercise a bit like this in an art class at junior school 100 or so years ago! (clearly something stuck!!)
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