All At Once

I realized recently that I have over 40 years of drawings and paintings. I have stacks and notebooks and rolls of work—not all of it beautiful— but piles and piles of attempts at something. It is almost shocking the number of times I’ve seen something in the world and tried to recreate it on a flat surface. You’d think I might have noticed by now that it’s impossible, because the world is stuffed, absolutely stuffed, with solid detail; and when you start packing it into two dimensions, you quickly run out of space. Pushing three dimensions into two is like trying to shove a rabbit back into a magic hat, with the result looking like the scratches you got in the battle.

The funny thing is that this compulsion to squeeze things into two dimensions is so common.  I once watched a 6-year-old boy draw a walk we’d just taken. On one piece of paper, he drew a line for the journey from the house; down the dirt driveway; across the road; to the path in the forest; to where the path curved next to the river; to the remains of an ambitious beaver dam (dismantled by the state park service); and then the boy looped the line back on itself and drew the return journey. The drawing included a bottle he’d found, a bridge we’d crossed, and not a lot else. But it was a pretty clear record of the afternoon, if you’d happened to be along on the walk. There was something nice about the way he put it all together on one piece of paper.

I suppose the compulsion is to try to make a picture that brings you back to where you have been. But in our recollection, the journey stretched out in real time has been compressed and the parts don’t have any distance between them. So, painting the view of the driveway, the road,the forest path to the river, the dismantled beaver dam, etc., each static and separate, doesn’t get the rambling, “alltogetherness” of the walk.

Probably what we really want to make is the whole WALK, all at once AND full of fantastic detail.

So- how do you do that?