Week One Notes

Week Two Notes

Week Three Notes

Week Four Notes

Week Five Notes

Week Six Notes

Being overwhelmed trying to think bigger, I go back to thinking smaller.  I keep coming back to my flimsy journal. The delicateness of the paper is beginning to interest me. The way it crinkles with the glue. The way it is too thin to hold paint. I like the tactile-ness of leafing through the brittle pages. I pulled some teabags and onion and garlic skins out of the trash and began gluing them down. There’s tiny marks and lines and scars in all these things naturally. Like maps. Instead of being a painter, I’m learning how to make marks, and observe the beautiful things just in the trash! What a welcome change. 

 I can’t separate my writing from my drawing. They always belong together. 

Swamplands. Where messy things get to dance.

You know how when you have in your head a few notes of a tune but you don’t know what it is, and if you hum it, it ends up becoming a different song from the one that’s nagging at you? Or when you remember a street corner but you can’t remember where it is? That kind of thing. My mother liked to use the word frantumaglia—bits and pieces of uncertain origin which rattle around in your head, not always comfortably.

I’d had in my mind for years to a sudden selection of fragments, welded into a story that seemed convincing—that escapes me, I can’t give an honest account. I’m afraid that it’s the same thing as with dreams. Even as you’re recounting them, you know that you’re betraying them.

Elena Ferrante

Walking women. End pages of Camino journal.