Beemouse Laboratories

In 2007-2008 I did a sketching project. I decided I would do a sketch a day for an entire year and post it to my flickr account publicly, whether I was proud of the sketch or not. I thought this would be good for me.

In the past couple weeks, I’ve been feeling anxious about a lot of the drawings I have online. I’m not sure exactly what prompted this anxiety. I suspect that what happened is that some part of my brain feels that many of the themes that were coming out in the drawings need to be laid to rest.

A lot of the drawings are about feeling sick (from lupus), having migraines, feeling lonely, searching for artistic identity, and… I get this overwhelming sense of explosive artistic energy that needed to go somewhere… and never really found outlet in those drawings. Ultimately, I stopped the project, because I felt like it was too much of a burden to have to come up with something daily– especially when the drawings usually turned out so poorly.

I started the “sketch a day” project on December 16, 2007. On September 7, 2008, I didn’t do a drawing, and noted the excuse, “sick sick sick”. On September 15th I didn’t do one– the note was “malaise. incurable malaise.” On September 18th I put the project on hold indefinitely.

I respect the impulses that led me to do that project… but it no longer feels appropriate for many of those drawings to be public. I have a much stronger sense of artistic direction now. I have very concrete ideas about what I want to do. I continue to work on those things when I get a chance (which isn’t much). In general, I like some things more, and some things less.

I remember that when I was a young adult I was very confused about the concept of “preference”. I wondered how people could have such strong preferences for things. (Food, clothing, music.) I realize now that I was so afraid to assert my own personality that I just assumed I didn’t have any preferences or personality at all. What strange times…!

Anyway, I want to sing those times a lullaby and put them to rest.

Here are the sketches that remain public.

Moth, 2008