2016 visual journal: adventures in change

If you’d like to watch me flip through this journal and talk about ideas and technique, click here.

Like other intuitive works, this journal’s imagery originated more from my creative subconscious than any intentional concept development.  As I have gotten older, I’ve made an effort to be more present and aware of my instincts and intuition.

Interestingly, I can now look back at works I created over the past few years, and see what my artistic subconscious was clearly attempting to make known. Ideas that subtly, yet consistently, drift through my work—and only when I look back at my art, months or years later, with a full knowledge of my feelings and past decisions do a realize a part of me knew something all along.

Somewhere, deep within myself—so deep my conscious mind refused to even acknowledge its existence, were these little messages to myself, these little warnings, or personal insights that my artistic intuition was trying to make known.

I started this journal near the end of my (ill-fated) Art Journal 365 project in 2014.  Most pages I created at that time were very intuition-based.  With little forethought or planning, explored the juxtaposition of imagery, textural styles, and the interaction between different mediums.  I worked to meet a quantity goal, and therefore, was not particularly analytic of the messages that may have been seeping into my work.

In early 2016, I returned to this altered book journal to clean up and redesign several of the pages, add more nuanced detail, and further accentuate highlighted text.  As I read through the pages, for the first time in over a year—for the first time since I had made the decision to leave my marriage, the phrasing and emphasis I choose at the time almost felt unsettling—as if a part of me knew far sooner than I was willing to admit, that a huge change was coming…