I am very excited that my doing my new morning ritual of waking up around 6:15, meditation, yoga, writing and drawing, has been so positive and really expanded my creativity. The principle of doing things for 15 minutes a day is a big part of this new discipline, as well as going to bed of course much earlier. My bedtime is now around 10:30, way earlier than ever before.
I’m now on day 26 of this morning and 15 minute practice thing. I always start with meditation for 15 minutes, followed by 20 or more minutes of yoga. Then I do either 15 minutes of writing or drawing. If I write in the morning, then later in the day I set the timer and do the 15 minutes of drawing and vice versa. This morning I did drawing and haven’t had a moment for the writing until now.
So this is my 15 minutes of writing that I usually reserve for my journal. Some of the writing is stuff I rip up and throw out and some of it is just journaling and some of it is about things I want to eventually write or edit or use in some way.
The best thing that happened with the drawing and writing besides really getting back to the drawing, was how the drawing and writing for the first time ever started to go together. The way it happened was first I got back to really getting in touch with how much just drawing, making marks and lines on paper, is really my most authentic form of art making. I felt like I had neglected it and was hiding in collage and other stuff and hadn’t really gotten to purely draw in months. Then the drawings started to be connected to what I’d been painting/using collage and paint doing, namely my cityscapes.
These cityscapes of the past months was a return to cityscapes I did a long time ago, around 2006 – 2010, on and off, that I titled “Inner Landscapes”. Now that they got back into the drawings, the lines and marks started to be houses and buildings again, but there is more going on now that is different from the previous series or even what I’d been doing this past year. Suddenly I had a drawing and was writing a story about the landscape I drew, a desolate landscape that was a kind of deserted place.
The first one that got paired with writing was a kind of empty street. Then I made another one that was called “After the Fire” that continued some of the themes from the first one. I’m in the middle of writing another one that feels like it’s about Tokyo, when I lived there as a child from 1977-1979. The drawings seem to be about old places in my mind, and in each writing there is a child sitting up in a room alone. I think the next one will involve this child being in Tokyo. From the writing it isn’t yet clear that these are old places in my mind, but I think as they continue building, it will become clear what the concept of the Inner Landscape involves.
Through writing during and on the back of the drawing about the spaces in the drawing, I am more in touch with what I think of as the “Inner Landscape”, where before I just thought, these are not meant to be images of the city, they are imagined landscapes in my head, so whenever people saw them and said, “Oh those are the city.” or “Is that NYC?” it seemed off to me and like I couldn’t explain exactly what they were or why they were Inner Landscapes.
Strangely I had recently started thinking that the cityscapes I was making were actually about New York City and living here and 9/11 and that the first series from over 10 years ago were more connected to 9/11 and living here downtown near Ground Zero than I previously realized.
15 minutes are up. I have been trusting that 15 minutes is usually enough, especially with the writing. I will post some photos of the drawings and writings thus far.
