The Art of Writing

I haven't written much about the mixed-media project I've been working on. I've posted a lot of the completed works, and I introduced the concept back when I started working on it, but the process is something I've wanted to share with you. It's been such an important part of why I've enjoyed working on it so much these past few months. 

Being a visual project, the images are extremely important. It's the biggest visual art project I've worked on it years and I've been loving this new outlet. But the writing aspects are equally important to me. I've been employing a cut-up technique in the writing part. I search though batches of text for a word or string of words that infuse the story portrayed in the image. Sometimes a string of words end up on my "thinking board" and inspires the selection of images that will be pieced together.

I've arranged the text into piles of small, medium and large font. Once I make a word choice, I dig into the corresponding font pile and search for completing pieces until the phrase captures the theme. I never try to force it, and never for look for a particular word (with the exception of a conjunction or article). There have been some times where I've spent as much time on the word puzzles as I did on the picture puzzle.

I use this title as starting point for the stream of consciousness pieces that follow. It's a kind of free writing style that I used to do all the time, and it's been great revisiting it without having to worry about coherency and plot structure. At the same time, there is a plot trajectory within the project as a whole. Each spread or page are pieces designed to borrow from the "hymn" structure of the book I'm altering.

The original book was hymnal and the poems in my project are meant to follow that genre or storytelling. They are little vignettes of a vast fantasy about the evolution of imagination as a magical power in children, and the empire of science and brutality attempting to destroy it. It is the fantasy of the main character in a novel I'm in the early stages of working on. 

I realized early on that I needed to transcribe the words before putting them into the book. Often they become illegible once I incorporated them into the artwork so that the words become part of the visual. There are at least two completed ones that that I don't know for sure what is written. Now I write the stream of words on a piece of a scrap paper, trying not to think too much about them.