The Message Project
There isn’t a single thing that cannot be drawn. Somehow.
I’d been using drawings to record messages to myself, ordinary things like reminders to buy milk or petrol, things I’d seen and other occurrences. I drew enough of them that they started to take on a visual form of their own, started to acquire a language. After a while I started to blog them.
I was drawing on Post-It notes, the international language of ‘message’, and the collection gradually built up over months to several hundred drawings. I was drawing daily, several different versions of the same message at a time. My pile of drawings grew fast. My discard pile grew even faster.
I had three rules for a successful post-it drawing, and one rule for the blog itself. Each post-it drawing must arise out of that ‘kick in the head’ moment when something in the day suddenly becomes significant. It must be a depiction that would serve to remind me of that moment and of what the message was, yet contain no words. And the resulting drawing must work as an image in itself.
The rule for the blog was that I never, ever told what the original message was. I constrained the viewer to see them as drawings which stood alone.