A new daily practice for 2017

I'm really enjoying my daily practice for 2017. As a way to capture those thoughts that always seem to be getting away, I decided to commit a few lines to paper via my Olivetti Lettera 22 each day. Even though my random thoughts do usually manage to get written down somehow—on scraps of paper, in the corners of already well-filled sketch book pages or even on my phone—it feels good to have found a way to start collecting some of them.

The easy part is writing—I "write" in my head all day long!—but I've realized how used to erasers, auto-correct and spell-check I have become...not to mention simply having the ability to edit. Rarely do my words tumble out as a true expression of exactly what I mean to say, or how I think it should best be said. The time spent with the typewriter is helping me to learn how to better define a thought in my mind first (though when I read back over them later I am finding that I often leave out letters, or even key words). I imagine the process will get easier as the weeks progress, and I hope the writing will become less clumsy/more elegant. In any case, I do look forward to sitting before the typewriter each day, hearing/feeling the metal type bouncing off the paper, watching the letters make words and the lines beginning to transform the previously empty space... It is these physical aspects that I appreciate as much as the words themselves.



 

A handful of entries...

 

{Incidentally, the name of the narrow street outside the studio window is

"Sdrucciolo de' Pitti" (since it leads out of Piazza Pitti). I had lived here for a while

before a local corrected my pronunciation of sdrucciolo (accent on the first syllable)

 —truly delightful when said by an Italian, hence the pleasure of hearing it!}

 

And a few more...

*

Another thing I'm excited about this year is painting this wall's-worth of canvases; there are nine in total, each just 40x50 cm. I prefer to work on much bigger canvases, but there's too much going on in our apartment to accommodate the activity of painting at such a scale (or to display the paintings when they're done!). I don't know when I'll get started, but for now I am enjoying their promise—my private installation to "Possibility"...

I hope that 2017 is still feeling full of promise and possibility for others as well...I don't know about you, but I wish I could hang on to that "New Year" feeling all year long! Here's to as much creativity and beauty as we can find...