Daily Pages

This ongoing process work is inspired by the "Morning Pages" exercise from Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way, the ritual of writing three pages of stream-of-consciousness thoughts every morning to clear out mental clutter. The rules of the original exercise are simple: dump your worries, to-do lists, and random thoughts onto paper so they're out of the way, and never look at them again.

I wanted to push this exercise further to encourage me to keep it up. Instead of paper, I use three canvases, one for each page. Every morning, I journal directly into wet paint, scratching out my thoughts, anxieties, and observations. The next day, I paint over them and start again. Because I know everything I create is going to be covered there is no pressure, and I can just enjoy the paint application, colour play, and gesture.

This temporary lifecycle removes all preciousness from the making process because the work is fleeting and never finished.

Daily sediment of these thoughts remain as the canvases grow heavier with dozens of buried layers, a relic or repository of hidden histories, private thoughts, time past and encapsuled.