This morning, on my usual walking route, I noticed a baby’s pacifier sitting on top of a wall. Someone must have dropped it, and someone else must have picked it up and put it there, out of the way. Even a lost object like this has a story. I like imagining what might have happened. I secretly like to think that little pacifier has already had a rather peculiar fate, with more strange turns still ahead. I want to know about the people involved in these small incidents, especially when it’s something done by someone I’ve met myself. Turning those impressions into drawings or words sometimes helps me understand myself a little better, too.

I feel that behind people’s actions lie their particular circumstances and the lives they’ve lived. How they grew up, what counts as “normal” in their culture, the different ways they respond to the same situation. There must be a story behind each of these things. (Though sometimes, I suspect this curiosity is mixed with a wish to believe that even the things other people do that trouble me have reasons I could understand.)

Those interests and wishes become the seeds of my drawings and writing. When I draw, I often choose people as my subjects. I want to give them back something of the impression they left on me. The emotional temperature of our exchanges, a certain softness in the things I saw and heard that is difficult to preserve in any tangible form. I want to put those impressions into a drawing and say, “This is how I saw you.” When I write, on the other hand, my attention turns much more strongly toward myself. I want to sort through what I felt without falsifying it, and examine it through both what I remember and what I’ve recorded. These two sides of creating are important to me.

As I put still-fresh memories and impressions into a piece of work, I begin to see how I was looking at someone. Often, I also realize where my assumptions or an idealized version of a memory have crept in. I like trying to capture the living, sometimes raw exchanges and feelings between people, things that can’t quite fit into a beautiful photograph of neatly arranged streets. And when creating becomes more than simply preserving an experience—when giving that experience a new form allows me to reconsider my understanding of it—something I began as a way of communicating with others can become a path toward changing myself.

The reason I’ve built this website and decided to keep a Journal is that I want to record the path to a finished work even more than the work itself. That path will probably include trial and error, hesitation, perhaps even suffering. The accumulation of these experiences feels like walking through life, or slowly making my way along a long-distance trail. Just as the experiences gathered along a road become important footprints for me to look back on, I hope the records I leave in this Journal might give someone reading them a way to experience, if only in glimpses, something of what I lived through.

I like adding small connections one by one, without making them any bigger than they are. That’s the way I’d like to write.