My default process when writing is closely akin to my process when beginning a drawing or collage. I put a blank piece of paper on the desktop and begin with a mark of some kind: a word or phrase, if I’m writing; a shape, if I’m drawing; a scrap of paper if I’m starting a collage. Donald Barthelme puts it in a way that makes sense to me:
The writer is one who, embarking upon a task, does not know what to do… Writing is a process of dealing with not-knowing, a forcing of what and how.
After that I proceed by making another, and another, and another, pushing into the space and watching what emerges as I work. As Billy Collins puts it:
The pen is an instrument of discovery rather than just a recording implement. If you write a letter of resignation or something with an agenda, you’re simply using a pen to record what you have thought out. In a poem, the pen is more like a flashlight, a Geiger counter, or one of those metal detectors that people walk around beaches with. You’re trying to discover something that you don’t know exists, maybe something of value.
The core concept, the fundamental practice, is thus purely explorational. I don’t know what I’m doing when I begin. And often, when I have finished, I would be hard-pressed to describe what I have done. The artwork, if it is successful, will speak for itself, and will invite the viewer to participate in the creation of whatever “meaning” the work might be understood to have. The “meaning” derived by one viewer will in all likelihood vary considerably from the meaning derived by another.
If this seems to be a somewhat arbitrary and potentially confusing way of proceeding, so be it. I find that submitting myself to this process to be both entertaining and, in the long run, very satisfying. (This all should sound vaguely familiar to anyone who has read my previous post about “the open text” in general and the poetry of Cole Swensen in particular.)
Anyway, all that I have written so far is by way of introduction to a few pieces I have recently completed which combine collage-making of a sort and drawing of a sort. In each case the artwork began as pure collage (pasting paper on paper), and upon completion of the collage work the pen-and-ink elements were added. I had not until recently thought to combine the two, but what resulted when I did so interests me:
