I haven’t been good for much this past week but in an effort to get something done I’ve been sorting the photos on my computer… the 56,000 photos. I’ve sorted about 20,000 now. First backed up en masse, but now in orderly folders on a portable hard drive. It’s the sort of thing that probably would have always remained a burden if not for the COVID confinement, and now that I’ve mucked up my ankle and can’t go for a bike ride, I really need a low-attention task to occupy myself. Doing this while listening to the Wolf Hall audiobook. Anyway, my travels are now neatly grouped, my art projects are neatly sorted, and photos of finished pieces ready to share are in their own folder too. Rather than an endless oppressive scroll of this an that all mixed up this is really nice. It’s also gratifying to see how many art projects I’ve done. It seems strange in some ways that I always think of myself as just arriving, just arriving at visual art. The photos show that I’ve been very regularly at it for five years, and that’s only as far back as this computer goes. Similarly I feel like I haven’t “gotten anything done” during isolation, but here too the photos show several pieces begun and finished. It’s a strange thing, this feeling of mine about my art. Not sure what that’s about, but it is incredibly persistent.
Anyway, here’s a photo from 2017 I like. It’s been fake spring in Calgary forever in the way that makes it feel like we’ll never have a proper recognizable season again, so the idea of a true fresh breath of cold winter air seems appealing and decisive right now.
