I’ve been wanting to make a drawing of this printer glitch for a long time. I drew it from mostly from memory because it was tacked on the wall behind me. I’d occasionally turn around to see if I was getting the general feeling, which mostly was a sense of pressure.
I made this drawing in response to a copy machine glitch that’s been floating around my studio for a while now. I didn’t look at it as I drew it, but I did occasionally glance back on the wall it was tacked to behind me to see if I was capturing the feel.
It’s hard to explain beginnings, how art grows out of itself. All I know is when I look at this this drawing I see it as both as something that stands on its own as well as a way into something else.
Mary Ruefle’s book Madness, Rack, and Honey is in part about the art of writing poetry. It’s helped me reframe the ways I approach making art. I’m rereading it for a second time now. The poets get it.
“I believe the poem is an act of the mind. I think it is easier to talk about the end of a poem than it is to talk about its beginning. Because the poem ends on the page, but it begins off the page, it begins in the mind. The mind acts, the mind wills a poem, often against our own will; somehow this happens, somehow a poem gets written in the middle of a chaotic holiday party that has just run out of ice and it’s your house.”
