There hasn’t been a lot going on except work, although I have launched back into my Chinese studies and I feel like it is a little easier after having been exposed to the language for the past three years. My motto is to take it slowly and do a little every day. I have seen a lot of the Chinese characters and now I can put them into some kind of context. I feel the language is quite beautiful and as an artist is also practical as it is visual. The platform I am on is better in a browser but also has an app. I can at least do a lesson on the bus and then do a little at home on a desktop. I am surprised at how much basic knowledge I have and I will at least remember a couple of new characters each day. I also try to do as many levels of one lesson as I can just to slow it down so I don’t try and go too far ahead and get out of my depth.

I have been drawing and my stress levels have been fairly low even though work is still difficult with all of the warehouse work we have to do these days. There is something simple about logistics but also quite taxing, it can be hard getting everything out in a timely manner. Some things look simple and then in practice become days worth of work, it is all-new for me but I am starting to get a feel for it. Drawing always leads to an enjoyment of the materials of drawing, the feel of heavy graphite or the subtle lines of a hard pencil followed by a soft pencil. I never get bored of it, also I feel like I am not hiding the medium behind any great skill or pretence. The drawing is part of the idea of drawing and the exploration of the material and what it is I think will lead to an idea in a painting on the street. 

I try to remember drawings I have seen that I like, especially Modernist drawings and wonder what it is to draw like that and if I am drawing like them at all. Maybe I am on a journey through drawing that leads to works on the street which are retrospective, possibly flawed in their irrelevance, and full of post-modernist, post-millennial aspirations with little understanding of what drawing should be. Although the reason I can be so ignorant and disinterested probably comes back to my age, although I watch a lot of younger artists quite closely, it only makes me even more ignorant and disinterested in a posing kind of way. I find perfection, digital detail, and meticulous effects admirable yet I wrote a short story about the inhumanity of perfection and the quest for precision as walls that separate and divide from the macro to the cellular.