Wrapping up the first month's work...

Spent yesterday working on six drawings at once - a definite luxury of this new studio configuration. In the standard studio, I can go between two or three drawings at a time. The advantage to working on a large number at a time is that I get ideas for variations faster and can start to spin them out...the disadvantage is that I have to finish the six of them before I can move on...

Here's a closer look at the drawings I am working through...

After Auden (Blessed are all metrical rules...)

In this one, planes of color are lifting off the cube structure. I am interested in following through on the plasticity of the form in future drawings, extruding and bending the forms....

After Marcel Duchamp (Each breath is a work of art....)

This and the next drawing are less about the role of writing than about the way speech lingers in the air...there used to be this idea among 19th century spiritualists that spoken words left traces in the world, and I wonder if Duchamp is reflecting this notion...

(Both) After Babbage (The air itself is one vast library...)

Both of these drawings take one quote from Charles Babbage (“The air itself is one vast library on whose pages are forever written all that man has ever said or woman whispered”), each configured slightly differently. I am curious to what extent they are the same drawing (their content is identical, but the configuration is different...)

After Jonathan Lethem (All writing consists of conjuration...)

Lethem's remark about writing ("All writing, no matter how avowedly naturalistic or pellucid, consists of artifice, of conjuration, of the manipulation of symbols rather than the ‘opening of a window onto life'") gets at something very important about inscription, I think...

So these are coming to a close and I'll post completed images on my website. I have been trying to figure out the correct relation between this diary and the sketchbook page on my site, and have concluded that I will just use this for everything until January, but I would appreciate your thoughts on the work in the sketchbook, as it is likely to appear over here at some point, in some form...