One Year
in Life, Love and Art.
It has been a year since my last post. So many things can change in a year. For me, most things have. One year ago I was not married, and I did not have a child on the way. I was still a university student and thought that I had already experienced most of what life is comprised of. Oh how naive I was.
Life can send a million things your way, things you may not have planned or anticipated, but these things can be more beautiful than the things you lay out for yourself. When life happens to go as you plan, it is calculated and well, boring. The more you love and the more you are depended upon, the more vulnerable you become. I have never had anyone rely on me the way my pregnant wife does. Our situation has created trials to overcome in the form of immigration, employment, and insurance. The little life growing inside of her has placed a responsibility on me that I have never known. In the last year alone I have experienced more fear and joy than I have in the last 25 years combined.
There are so many ways to chronicle a year, through blogs, scrapbooks, journals, poems, and songs. The pictures in this post contain the entire contents of a sketchbook that I completed over the last year. This sketchbook has traveled Canada and the world with me. Some of these drawings were completed in New Zealand, Australia, America, British Colombia, as well as, the bitter cold of Thunder Bay. These pages travelled with me, seemingly unrelated drawings attached to memories. Different drawings for different purposes, concepts, commissions and characters. From before I was married through to the wedding, as well as the conception of my first child, it has been a year to cherish, as well as one to flourish. I have been pushed on all sides, forced to make decisions and to act on them. Long gone are the days of complacency, I needed to take any skills I had developed and run with them.
Sketchbooks are a strange entity, part journal and part portfolio. When someone is looking through my sketchbook I feel separated from myself and entirely vulnerable. As proud as I am scared. Half of me will sit pretending not to be uncomfortable and the other half will be spiritually looming over their shoulder. When painting an artist has an opportunity to prepare a piece for viewing, and spiritually separate from the piece. A sketchbook leaves you exposed, with ideas strewn about in a seemingly incoherent order. Thoughts exposed on paper, there is a vast amount to read into within most sketchbooks. An artists strengths and weaknesses both artistically and personally, laid bare. So here I am, naked for all to see.
