"I read books, watch movies. I feel plugged into my inspiration. I can absorb art before I have to expend it."
I love that quote from our dear Hudson Williams; I love thinking of artists like sponges that need to soak up inspiration before they can wring it out in their work again, and I feel like I've been in need of a reset, a moment of stillness to soak up art and really brew in it. Like following a road map leading home to myself and my creative practice, I watched a handful of films this week and got deep into a book of poems by Kate Baer. I also created: a short film, two package designs, a few posters, a couple beaded fish, and a week's worth of sketches.
As part of this week's practice, I sketched an "everyday" landscape view each day. I took my everyday views—the Aurora bridge along the Burke, the hillside houses of Magnolia through my dining room window—and sketched.
I'm not much of an illustrator, and I usually find myself frustrated when drawings don't come out picture-perfect. For this week, I intentionally made sketchy, messy renditions in an effort to ditch that never-good-enough outlook. I surprised myself to find that I enjoyed sketching the structured, architectural features perhaps even more than my go-to natural ones; it was almost meditative to translate the lines in front of me onto the page.
