LIFELINES

Sometimes all we need is some distance and time. To realize that the process wasn’t just the process. It was the real thing. And to get a sense of perspective sometimes it helps to squint your eyes to see what you’re really looking at. Sometimes it helps to step away. To go further out. Abstracted further and further, everything becomes heat and shapes. Line and colour. Light and everything else. Gravity and nothing.

When I looked back at these colour studies I did during a period of what I felt like was creative stagnancy at the time, I realized how much of my sense of growth and change came from an external place, how I didn’t know how to measure life at all, how I was so bad at observing progress. If success was money or security, is there a cutoff for done? Looking around me I saw that there never seemed to be. Once you line up for the road, you realize it’s a conveyer belt with no perceivable end. An untouchable horizon. Nothing is good enough until you are far away enough looking back. But we love a horizon because we know we can't get there, because it's always ahead. 

This is what change looks like from the inside looking out, and from the outside looking in. Up close it’s just lines stacked, dots arranged until they make something we can make sense of. A poem about a bird, a photo I took on a plane, a two-way lifeline to pull me back.