You split your brain in two. One half holds what you’re seeing – either through the mind’s eye or through the two normal face eyes – and perceives edge, brightness, darkness, every piece of reality in relation to itself, defined by placement and proportion. The other half of your brain holds the pencil, places it where it must be, modulates the pressure, the angle, creating the line, shading the space, defining a new reality by line and value, placement and proportion.
This is the process of art.
I don’t just mean the process of drawing, I mean the process of all art. For drawing this might last only a minute, or perhaps hours or days – but sometimes this process gets suspended across months, years, decades. It’s not easy to remember the castle you dreamed of while you’re laying its bricks and mortar. Eventually the process starts to become only the work ahead of you, the dream wafting out of reach, getting replaced with a concrete and quantifiable reality – which was, yes, the goal all along, but is it better this way? Do you prefer it? Don’t you miss before, when instead of something it could have been anything?
I’m afraid of finishing work, because that which is complete inherently has less potential than that which is unrealized. Every corridor in a dream castle ends in a question-mark: Every corridor in a real castle ends in a wall. For someone who fell in love with the question marks, it’s hard to stay as enthusiastic about the walls – even if those are what hold the whole damn thing up, even if those are what keep the cold away. For these really long projects, these dream castles, we create intermediary products to keep us from losing our place – we write descriptions, draw blueprints, tell our friends, we plan, we slowly manifest the dream into reality. Each of this steps brings us closer to our destination – each brings us further from our origin. Each brings us closer to reality, and further away from the reasons we sought to manifest that reality in the first place. We chase away the specters and obsessions that possessed us and drove us forwards, and we are bereft.
There is, in the end, an irresolvable divide between the imagined and the created, a divide the artist is constantly trying to bridge only to find the bridge burning behind us. It’s easier on us to forget what we once dreamed of than to remember that it was once infinite, unbound, unrestrained. This artistic amnesia is a necessary part of the process, or we just end up building the same castle over and over, trapped in its corridors of unattained perfection.
We sleep, in the rooms we build, and there amidst the wood-creaks and wind-whistles of our shortcomings we dream anew.