Not unrelated to the recent thoughts I’ve had about art school friends and the work we were all producing back then, I’ve been toying with the idea of finally unpacking — literally — the scraps of work I produced during those ancient, halcyon days and putting it some of it up here.
I mean, I’ve been toying with it in a more relaxed, laid back manner for years at this point — I might even have teased doing it once or twice, for that matter — but there’s always been the problem of, to be blunt, my laziness when it comes to actually unpacking the various boxes it still exists in (well, what little of it still exists) and then scanning it all in or photographing it, or whatever would be necessary to making it all happen. It always sounds like a good idea in theory, and then the practical elements come in to spoil the party.
Yet, here I am again, thinking that this might be the year and this might be the time. I blame a couple of influences in this regard: re-reading Eddie Campbell’s Alec: How to Be an Artist, which excels in making self-mythologizing appealing — not to mention, attempting to create a quasi-accurate accounting for your own past in the process — but also re-reading an issue of Kevin Huizenga’s Or Else in which ended the series by advertising a number of future issues that would never happen.
That last one made me imagine writing new installments of the work I wrote and drew for the university newspaper when I was a student, as if I’d continued to do it across the past 27 years or however long it’s actually been since I stopped. (I didn’t want to do it for the final year of my undergraduate program, so… since mid-1996, I guess…?) But in order to do that, I feel like I’d have to share some of the original pieces, so…?
Again, maybe this won’t happen, yet again. Maybe I’ll search all of this stuff out, take a look and then feel so embarrassed it stays locked in my budget version of the Disney Vault. Or, just maybe… maybe this is the year to put all that back out into the world after all. We’ll see.