Visual Dispatch #6

A photograph of two bits of paper. The first has "How do you want to feel?" written across the top with a list of adjectives below. They include connected, fulfilled, stable, lauded, validated, helpful, effective, accomplished, calm, grounded, proud, challenged. Below that are phrases like "Survival without worry" and "Creating empathy in others". The page on the right lists five categories "Financial, Emotional, Internal, External, and Visible".

I was emptying out my backpack this morning and a bunch of bits of paper fell out of a hidden sleeve. There were postcards from my trip to Hawai‘i in 2017, thumbnails from the comic about Federated Learning I made for Google in 2019, and a couple scraps of paper containing (I’m fairly sure) notes for this talk on success—also from 2019.

I wish I could remember where the lines in quotation marks came from. Maybe they were responses from the participants at that workshop? Maybe they came up before I even gave the talk? Either way, it reminded me how much I’d poured into those two presentations (the other was about money, surprising no one), and how glad I am to have recorded them.

I’m stuffed up with a head cold this week and feeling very sorry for myself, so this video window into a me who was, well, with it feels really validating. So much has changed and twisted and refined in the past two years. I feel smaller in some ways—like the circles of influence I previously occupied have shrunk considerably—but also deeper. In the five spheres of success above, I feel as if I’ve traded Visible, External, Financial, and possibly even Internal success for something deeply Emotional. And I’m still trying to let the dust settle on that decision and learn how to make peace with it.

The lesson remains: these questions are never truly answered. Not really. Not if I’m doing it right.

Wherefore Show Opening!

Exciting news, dudes! The first 12 pages of Wherefore, the graphic novel I embarked on over the summer, will be in a show opening this Thursday at Reed College!

The shindig goes down at 4:30 pm in the Art Building (for those of you not from the Reed Community, enter in the East Parking Lot (SE 36thish and Woodstock) and head for the blue-roofed building in the NE corner of the lot), and the work will stay up another week or two. The exhibition will include pages from the original script, sketches, studies, penciled pages, and the final inked product, offering a complete overview of my process. I’ll be giving a brief presentation about the creation of the work around 4:45 and it would be excellent to see your smiling faces there. I haven’t yet decided how to go about posting the pages on the web (if at all), so this might be your only chance to see them for a while.

The project was made possible by the Kaspar T. Locher Summer Creative Scholarship, which goes out to four Reed students every Spring. The other three recipients will also be presenting work, so if you make it you can also look forward to awesome paintings, poetry, and a documentary shot in Peru. Cool stuff all around.

That’s all from me for now. Hope to see you all this Thursday!