"Practice"

“Practice” 

8” x  10”, 22 pages

edition of 6, each semi-unique

             Ingredients: vowels, mono-prints, digital prints of used press-type sheets, rubber stamps.

notes:

          Making rows of linked figure 8s down the page in grade school penmanship class - the anxiety of fucking it up – compared to later, drawing linked 8s in the margins anywhere, doodling. The particular feel of that repetitive gesture became embedded, became an outlet for anxiety, an aid to concentration. I see now that penmanship - (which I hated - no, I hated the stress) - was actually a practice in concentration like tennis:  stay there on the page with your eye on the ball but relaxed, not self-conscious, alert. Attention drifts for a moment  and you lose it. To achieve that quality of supple attention the whole body must be brought into play… 

           I always had a drifty mind. “Daydreams in class’ scrawled in red on report cards.

           Rolling black ink on a sheet of plexi , writing / drawing into the wet ink and printing it – shades of  blackboard. The schoolroom blackboard of Practice: write the letter ‘a’ fifty times. Punishment: I will not talk in class, fifty times. Fifty was a significant number. Performance: who can write the right answer on the board? Diagramming sentences. Physics. Geometry. Blackboard was a thinking board,  erasures were the poetry of it. 

          The connection between writing and thinking for me became drawing.

 On display at Key Projects, in the exhibit: "Image worth reading" - October 2015

(Press Rappel)