Please Pardon This Interruption…
I’ve been posting on The Overleaf Chronicles Blog for four months, and I’m fairly happy with the result. Still, it needs a few tweaks here and there, and I’d like it to be a little more focused, so I’m taking a short hiatus from The Overleaf Chronicles to get some things in my personal and professional life in order that will help me do just that.
The past several years had already been a time of upheaval in my life, and I had been working on getting things back on track. When the Covid-19 lock down hit, I started using the resulting free time to organize my art and drafting supplies, and as time passed I expanded my attention to include years of keepsakes, memorabilia, and paperwork that have accumulated over the past half century of my life. It hadn’t occurred to me how much information – and sheer junk – I have collected until I began gathering it and saw it in one place. I’m now sorting it to form an organized collection and reference library I will use to inform my creative works in a time beyond Covid-19, when things are not quite so restrictive or potentially dangerous.
Sorting through this pile of stuff is personally fascinating and triggers so many memories – some happy, some sad, and thankfully, much of it disposable. I’m no minimalist, but much of what I’ve collected through the years has outlived its usefulness and needs to go. Among the diverse items collected are school notes, theatrical programs, clipped newspaper and magazine articles, architectural research, design proposals, inventories, magazines, artwork concepts and telephone number lists. What fascinates me are the themes that are common through the years. It turns out I’ve been interested in drawing since I was a very young child. Cooking and food have always held my attention. Archaeology intrigues me. I’ve been fascinated by the creation of stained glass since the age of fourteen. Clipped magazine images of lush courtyards and carefully landscaped estates proved that gardening has been a lifelong love that managed to infiltrate my consciousness even when I thought an actual garden was far away. Jewelry design, furniture design, ceramics, quilting, architecture…it’s all there, carefully recorded in research, business proposals, images, and articles I’ve clipped and saved through the years.
This collection spans several main periods of my life, starting with my early childhood through High School, my college years, my move to NYC and a 20 year life there, finishing with my return to Texas and life as a caregiver to my parents. Once all this detritus has been consolidated, refined and distilled into a unified system, it will help form a more cohesive personal and professional style that I’ll use to create new designs, new artwork and new blog posts for The Overleaf Chronicles.
