slow sunday morning xvi
Good afternoon. It's 5:13pm, and I'm back in the studio. It almost feels like I never left the way they whip you back into shape here.
My roommate and I had quite a languorous lunch earlier today consisting of cafeteria ramen and a cold latte each. Our lunches are always like this, even if we've got places to be and things to do. Conversation about whatever project we're suffering on, whatever political state our country is suffering in, whatever unimpressive plans we have for the day, all interjected with bouts of people-watching and coffee sipping. There's a few regulars we like to spy on, a few infamous spottings (like a man with a mountain of spinach, no dressing, no nothing, or another with 8 fried eggs in a pile. What do you need all that for?), or simply enjoying a little silence in numbers.
Upon our return, I gave her a quick rundown of what my idea for our current assignment is looking like so far. One thing I've begun to understand about my architectural language is that appearance means next to nothing to me. Function matters. Pathways, the way light hits the wall from the window and cascades to the floor, yes. Every part of a building, all in all, serves the people. That's really what I care about. Lives that walk in and out, leave their mark on a site, whether by physical means or simply by word of mouth. People, people, people. They're why spaces have meaning, they're why our lives have meaning.
I find this sentiment is confirmed most in periods of solitude. Before the school year started crashing down on me, I took an afternoon to walk around the National Gallery by myself and get some long-overdue sketching done. I refrained from lamenting on here too much about my lack of creativity this summer (although I certainly let some of it slip), but now that I'm starting to finally crawl out of it, I feel a little better talking about it. Sometimes the best thing to do when there's nothing clear enough floating around in your head is to pull from those who came before you.
I've written about the Group of Seven on a previous Sunday. They're perhaps some of the only people who saw Canada in a shade truer to life than actual life can show. Our snowy, silent winters, our forests and mountains and gentle dappled sun. I can't beat the original, but boy, are they the blueprint for loving the day as it comes. Every Canadian gallery I go to, I linger for a while at whatever the group has to show me that day. I wouldn't define it as parasociality in the modern sense, however, I do feel almost as if I'm greeting an old friend when I faced with that familiar lens of my home once again.
When I copy straight from my eyes to page, it's not with the intent of getting a replica, or even for learning the fundamentals, the composition. It feels a little more like I'm trying to decipher the snippet of time where the artist was devoted to their page by following in their footsteps. Which tones came first, did you work from light to dark, or the other way around? Who stood, tall and proud, hair as their cloak, so you could capture their likeness like I am now, some hundred and twenty years later? Is that tree in your foreground still waving in the wind to this day, or am I dragging out its lifetime from the dead for just a little longer in graphite form?
After leaving the gallery, I spent the rest of the afternoon getting some of that sweet September sun in on the grass with the rest of them, the last sunbathers before fall starts to bite back again. I've been reading Just Kids by Patti Smith lately, almost done with it. Her writing makes me grateful for having so many kindred spirits in writing, in the arts, in architecture, in any discipline I've tried failed, succeeded in dipping my toes in. Her life story makes me want more and more to push myself to the limit, she's got the way down, getting by with a little help from her friends. People, people, people.
Before reading this book, the only thing I knew from her was her spoken word piece, Piss Factory, out of a zine I can't recall from the Zine Library. I love that raw sound, I love that honesty. I've since listened to all of her discography, but I can't help that this remains my favourite.