Sifting

I've been thinking about space and scaffolding and what remains and what falls through. I used to paint on wood panels with acrylic and layers of charcoal and chalk. Tonight I took a pencil to this scrap of linen book cloth I found in my studio. I extended the line onto cardboard. The cloth is like screen, it is unravelling and I can see through it, but not clearly. Sort of like an early morning.

My sweetie gave me a book he'd found in a used bookstore. The Chatauqua Yearbook is from 1897 and smells like old sweaters and basements and boxes opened after a long time. The pages are hand sewn and the paper edges unfinished and brown. I found it in a pile along with some old paintings of mine.

The book has words of advice for every day of the year.

Desperate. What a word. It's felt a little desperate the past few years. Death in the immediate family. Tumor surgery. Watching small children grieve. Forgetting to paint. "Every day is a little life..." the book says. So I'll take book making materials and draw on them and invoke contentment, even if for just a little minute in this big life.

Downstairs I hear my daughter playing piano and singing. My son is asking me to come read to him. The pencil on the linen is a signature of some kind. Or new etymology of a map to somewhere new.