Like a lot of friends my age, Star Wars was transformative. I remember we were having dinner with my neighbors at a restaurant, and my neighbor asked my dad if we had seen Star Wars yet. “No,” said my dad. “You must take Jimmy! It’s full of space stuff, like NASA.” So, my dad took me. It was summer, and when we left the theater, the world seemed dim somehow. I wanted to get back into that other world where people had laser swords and could move stuff with their minds. I drew this picture when we got home, trying to capture the film as though it were a fading dream. I need not have worried, however. I saved my lawn mowing money and went to see it every chance I could after that day.
Back in 2008, I started a sketchblog on a domain that I no longer own. The original post is still on this site, and I imported the drawings that I had publicly shared into this blog after I stopped using that site.
I started drawing as a little boy. Obviously, I still draw. I say obviously more to myself than you, as there were great stretches of time when I did not regularly draw. Up to today, however, I have been drawing regularly since 2007.
When I was a child, adults tended to tell children that they could become anything they wanted to be when they “grew up.” My initial answer to that question was that I wanted to be any of the following:
An automobile, or
A 50′ tall skeleton
This was followed briefly by wanted to be bionic, and failing that, a giant robot. A little later, when I had a better understanding of the assignment, I knew that I wanted to be “an artist.”
I went through three distinct artistic periods of development as a youngster. Originally, I wanted to draw things and be a visual artist. I drew all the time – in notebooks, textbooks, on the backs of placemats in restaurants that used paper placemats, and on the backs of my dad’s old office documents.
The other periods that followed: I wanted to be a writer. I discovered my love of books thanks to The Hobbit, which I devoured in 6th grade. Inspired by weekend games of Dungeons and Dragons, I wrote fantasy and horror stories. I won a middle school writing contest, and was sent to a “Gifted and Talented” creative writing camp at St. Mary’s College the summer after 8th grade. I believe it was my college essay submitted with my application to Washington College that opened that door for me. It certainly wasn’t my high school academic performance.
My creative ambition then shifted into music, which I’ve written about extensively elsewhere on this site. I’ve been playing drums since my early days in elementary school, but I became more interested in music as a social passport in middle/high school.
I’ve carried these disciplines with me through life, and I came to learn early in my adult life that they are all the same thing. Which is to say, the modalities and final output might be different, but my core approach to them uses the same part of my thinking, and self.
My ability to write music, and frankly to understand any formal structures (music theory applied to composition, plot, visual composition, etc.) allowed me to quickly become good at making CAD drawings, to understand and work with complex relationships in database design, and to able to write programs in half a dozen computer languages. The periods when I was not actively drawing were offset by learning the magic of the Internet. Again, in my brain, it is all the same. Making an album is very similar to completing an animated story, or putting together a comic. All of this is similar to the complexity involved in making a website: gathering the content, designing a great experience for website visitors, writing the SQL queries and stored procedures to manage that data, monitoring the site’s usability, and maintaining the underlying technologies.
Returning to the topic of the sketchblog – when I wrapped that up in 2009, I had accomplished something. Aside from the several Moleskine notebooks I filled, I was empowered by the act of daily drawing, and had uncovered a new creative path to follow. Sometime after that, I started a daily photoblog, which I maintained for about two and half years. Again, I saw my daily life in a new way, and had a new appreciation for seeing my world. The output actually didn’t matter as much as the act of pausing in my day and just seeing (or, being present). During the pandemic, I began writing music everyday. Once again, I made key-to-me discoveries, and developed new approaches to music making that are vital to me now. I recommend this practice for anyone interested in any medium or modality.
In Rick Ruben’s excellent book The Creative Act, he suggests that ideas have a time, and when we encounter an idea, then that idea’s time has come. If we do not act upon that idea, someone else will.
Over the past 6 months, I keep bumping into and rubbing up against drawing. Certain themes and ideas keep jumping out at me, and I will not ignore them.
This title jumped out at me when we visited Second Story books, and I could see layers of meaning in it.
I intend to draw every day in 2025, but this is a slightly different pursuit than my first sketchblog. I’ll share more as it is revealed to me, but I wanted to put my intention down in writing here.
A final thought: kids know how to draw. Eventually, through their parents or society, they may come to believe that they cannot draw, and maybe they stop. This is a common scenario, and I can point at specific times this happened to me. I became self-conscious and, in turn, self-critical— and not just of my drawings but of many other things. I’ve spent the past few years intentionally examining and pulling apart the “self-conscious + self-critical” knots on my self-imposed restraints. As the knots come loose, freedom and ease return, and space within myself becomes once again available. It’s the same space in which my younger self made unselfconscious drawings.
I’m going to use the tag dwgs for any work made as part of this campaign. My intuition is telling me that drawings will play an important part of 2025.
