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Romantic elaborations on “Helping myself feel more like myself”
Last fall, Bryan asked if I'd like to produce a project for Great River Review, the University of Minnesota's graduate writing program's magazine, for an issue he was helping produce, and I mean, naturally. I took the opportunity to try for the third(!) time to make the "zine" version of "Helping myself feel more like myself," a digital collage that collects many of "my little guys" that I'd made so I could hang it up and look at it and get charged up. The resulting project for Great River Review, "Romantic elaborations on 'Helping myself feel more like myself'" starts from the finished collage, cuts that back up again into smaller parts, and adds additional text and drawing to each image.
The key thing for me to finishing this project was the offer of suitable full-color production. A lesson here about not letting design on my own projects be dictated by the formal limitations of my own standard strategies ("a multiple must be a photocopy thus must be b&w"... well, no) - what I want to do on my own terms shouldn't ever be bound this way, or set up like "client work," where success is defined in preexisting external terms (as in e.g. drawing new yorker cartoons).
Two drawings from the earlier failed production attempts are below, followed by the intro I wrote to the finished for GRR, followed by the project images themselves. Thank you to Bryan for the alley-oop. :)
I'm standing in the studio, the lights are on, I'm psyching myself up, for the millionth time telling myself: "nothing comes from nowhere... I seek to honor & advance what I learned from my teachers and influences... I can make this next move..." yet for some reason I can't, I so easily become confused, my own knowledge and experiences become obscure to me, access onto my own tactics has again come to feel limited, I forget what I'm doing and why -
by now I've been here a million times too, know to change gears, try to step back, return to one of the elementary particles... take for instance my drawing line, as if it were a continuous mark, unspooling for miles across thousands of drawings, tens of thousands of days, familiar as candlelight -
gradually its illumination re-reveals those teachers and influences all around me, standing over me as if in an operating theater, patiently waiting to reteach me the same lessons again and again... what was it about adventure, danger, romance, delicious flavors, color, humor, the grotesque, the beautiful, the innocent, the stupid, the riddling? nature, the built environment, music, shadows, a face looking into a window...? and with the fluttering feeling of ideas moving across the surface of my mind, I can tell I'm on my way back -
I thought, maybe I might get less lost less often if I had a picture of this stuff to look at? I could use it to remind myself, to help myself feel more like myself -
- 11/25/2025
36"x24" digital poster prints of this collage (such as I have hanging at TPH) are theoretically available. Feel free to email me if this is of interest to you.