On planning and creativity
Today I walked around my neighborhood for two hours snapping around 50 pictures of front doors, side doors, windows, garages, etc., to sort through and decide: ink drawings or watercolors, delete or save for later? In Eken Park, the houses are small and close together, framed by scraggly pines and oak trees thinned out by electrical wires.
From a distance, I must look like any other beanie-donning queer wandering around Madison, hands stuffed into my jean jacket, dark pants tucked into my brown, lace-up work boots. And of course, the gait. But if you look a little longer, my mannerisms reveal that maybe I’m up to something; I constantly turn my head from side to side, assessing every house on either side of the street as angles shift and perspective changes. I pause, I pace back and forth. I appear hyper alert, maybe even a little sketchy. Sometimes I’ll walk into the street or even your front yard.
I ask myself this one question as I go: would that be fun to draw? Pleasure lives at the core of it. If the inkling is there, I take a picture. If I ignore that feeling, I almost always turn back around, or else it will agitate me for the rest of the walk.
Each drawing I complete takes a lot of planning. I’d be hard pressed to sit down without a reference photo. The whole process is pleasing to me. Searching for a moment and being “captured” by it. Selecting a picture out of the lot. Choosing my materials. Lightly sketching out the dimensions, and then finally putting pen to paper.
I love the planning stages, and the excitement of those first few lines. First, a roof floats in the middle of nowhere, then a pipe cuts through the white space and connects to a window, which touches a wire, that leads to a flowerbed. And suddenly—after many hours—I have a house with all its clues of the living: the ways it’s been neglected (peeling paint) and kept up (shovels nearby). It’s not only satisfying, it’s comforting too. To have finished something, to see myself as capable of finishing something. And know that the lived thing is out there apart from me.
In the past couple years, I’ve been trying to introduce more spontaneity into my writing process, which for me meant less planning, more diving in and seeing what happens. But it’s like trying to draw from memory. It just doesn’t work for me.
For most of my life, I’ve felt that whatever I’m doing can’t be right; there’s some better way to draw, to write, to live, out there, somewhere in the world, and I’m not doing it. This is learned, and it can be unlearned. I’m just now coming to terms with the idea that I think I got it right. I think I found something that I love doing, and I do it well. What if that’s true? What’s next?