My Hike: Week 2

I went on another hike today, the same trail as before because it's super close to my house and really beautiful. I've been really enjoying this time seperated out to just think, with no distractions or worries that I need to be focusing on something else more urgent. I decided that I'm going to make "My Hike" a weekly feature on my blog as a way to share with you these thoughts and ideas and welcome any feedback or discussions that may arise.

What was on my brain most this hike was the idea of giving yourself a project or series to develop yourself creatively in some way. An example of this would be my Spontaneous Bread blog. I started this blog to get myself to draw on a daily basis, in a set time-limit: 30 minutes, and to be completely spontaneous, no prior thought until I start moving the pen on a piece of paper. The obvious reasons for doing a project like this is to develop my drawing skills, my spontaneity, and to develop a huge body of work that could possibly seed larger ideas and projects. Which is all why I picked this specifically. However the main goal of doing a project like this is to push yourself to the point of discovery, doing something over and over again you will inevitably learn something that you could of never discovered otherwise.

My last project was my journal (page 1 shown above). When I initially started it in 2005 I decided for this journal I was going to set up parameters for myself. These being that I would use mostly pen and ink, b/w, because this was the medium I was the most into at the time, and I would fill up every inch of space on each page. This density of the work on a page is what resulted in my journal taking me 4 years to complete even though I worked on it practically every day. In the end I had discovered what I considered was "my style" and "the way I journal". I had even forgotten that the only reason I do have "the way I journal" was because of these initial parameters I had set-up that had become something much more than that over the years. I knew my journal was done the moment I realized I could get nothing more out of it, that I had pushed and pushed and pushed this project until it was squeezed dry and I was ready to move on to the next thing. I am currently trying to figure out what I am going to set-up for my next journal, but I believe its going to do something with color because this is an area I know I need to push myself in (I know color theory like the back of my hand, but I have done very little color pieces).

In the end the reason I do anything is to understand creativity, the visual world and my own creative instincts. I dont know what further projects I will create for myself but I know there will be lots!