cake
Steve and I have been working on our manuscript more intensely in the past two months — my hope is to get it out and in its home before January 1. Which means I go to my studio each day and stare at it and try not to stare at it and avoid it and then rush to the writing desk and work on it before I can notice that I’m working. It’s good to take time away from it, because when I come back I see in a way I haven’t seen it before. It’s sculptural, like I can be right up close to it for months and then step away and realize that there’s a whole other part of the sculpture that I haven’t even addressed yet. There’s so much to think about at once when working on a big piece, so many facets, it feels bigger than my body.
I decided in July that the manuscript needed photographs, but I’m chickening out these days — or rather I can’t feel if that impulse is coming from a true space or from that frantic space that I see Rosie in sometimes when we’re in Ikea or the grocery store, that sudden impulse to have everything and so the craziest thing suddenly seems best. So there’s more waiting, more thinking to be done.
But I was looking through our photographs, and I selected some that I thought might work or might-might work, and then I desaturated the photographs so that they’d look the way they’d most likely have to look in a book (oh which makes me realize ten-fold that my photographs grab color, while my drawings grab line, and I’m not sure when/if those two worlds will ever cross). I found this photograph I took last year of my mom’s vegan coconut cake wrapped in saran wrap, and I can’t get enough of it. A very plain photo, plain composition, no color, but it’s so crinkly and yummy and important, those toothpicks like Stonehenge.
