Observation journal: Reflections and fingertip-memories

Another summary page from the observation journal — I was becoming obsessed with gilt.

I was playing with paint pens here (previously seen on Framing devices, and stories in the ornaments), which reinforced a regularly recurring point: Using materials/media incidentally does make me discover and like them more, but it also makes me understand them better, and discover new ways of using them (in this case, I was embossing the gold-painted paper). That is a lesson I just learned yet again tonight. I need to keep remembering to build play/experimentation time in between deadlines.

This thought seemed to link to a note during that week about the idea of memory being stored in places and objects, and with the idea of “tidying as discovery” in Austin Kleon’s Keep Going, and the way “doing scales” with materials sort of stores some of the skill in the interface with the objects themselves, and stories about typesetters picking up errors in languages they didn’t speak, simply because their hands knew the positions of the letters they usually set in place, and so they recognised an unfamiliar combination.

At this point, the ongoing enquiry into the trick of getting from idea to thing seemed to be traceable to the interaction of THOUGHT with TIME with INCLINATION, with the obvious reference to Do You Have the Time, Lydia?.

In the next week of the journal: The art of Sarah Caudwell-ing.