All who wander are not lost.

This is the new subhead for Sleepwalks. I’d read the words somewhere long ago, Google tells me they’re attributed to J.R.R. Tolkien, and they come floating to the surface of my mind this morning, strumming some familiar chords.

I gave the same title I gave to a serigraph (silk screen print) I made in a UT class around 1998. After a painful and prolonged struggle with my perfectionist tendencies (read: artist's block) I finally completed the assignment in the nick of time. In a last ditch effort to make something, anything, lest I fail an art class (an art class!) I let loose a controlled doodle of sorts, a visual language that I knew like breathing. The title was a pledge to myself, that I was making my own way in uncharted territory, that there was no right way to proceed, only the way that was unique to me.

Unfortunately my esteemed professor was a champion of realism; he prided himself on hand-registered silkscreen printmaking of hundreds of colors. He meant well, but his vocal disappointment with what finally manifested itself on the 16x20 paper left me crippled artistically again until years later.

"The end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time."
- T.S. Eliot

Thankfully, I've since learned to edit out much of this self-doubt, though not all. Like weight-training, the ego gets stronger when repeatedly challenged. New York is one big ego-gym, with people fighting for their 15 minutes everywhere you turn. Well I don't need 15 minutes, thanks, I have a blog!

Welcome to Sleepwalks, 2006. More words this year.