Evolution of a cardboard box (Part 1)

The Saturday before last I stopped at Crestwood Coffee for a cup of caffeine and an empty cardboard box. For a few years they’ve been supplying me with these great big  boxes that their coffee cups come in, and I’ve been drawing pictures on the boxes. I spent much of the day that followed at The Jaybird (open Saturdays, 11 to 4!), seeing what I could do with this latest swath of cardboard.

Leaving The Jaybird, I grabbed some barbecue from Saw’s and headed up to Camp McDowell for the Alabama Folk School‘s concert that night: an evening of singing from China and Mary Ann Pettway, two of the celebrated Gee’s Bend quilters, plus a showcase from a stageful of bluegrass greats, including Tony Trischka(!!) and others. Back in my room, I got back to work on my box, moving back and forth between drawings of Peetie Wheatstraw, Roscoe Holcomb, and Los Penguinos del Norte.

Yesterday and today I got in a little more time with the drawings, mostly with Roscoe. I thought I’d post the work in progress here; I’ll post some more updates once I have them, and then the finished things.

The impetus to share these unfinished creations comes in large part from spending time with the writings of Austin Kleon (I much recommend his newspaper blackout poetry), who tirelessly advocates that you show your work — that you take people behind the scenes, sharing not just your finished products but the messy, private process itself, that you become a documentarian of what you do, keeping track of and exposing for others the vulnerable, daily ins and outs of how you go about making things. Kleon says you should share something small every day, creating some form of “daily dispatch.” Not only does this challenge open up your process to others; it frees you to think in modest, accessible chunks, rather than having you bank on some impossibly ambitious opus to come. “A good daily dispatch,” writes Kleon, “is like getting all the DVD extras before a movie comes out — you get to watch deleted scenes and listen to director’s commentary while the movie is being made.”

I don’t intend to do this every day; I don’t think anyone’s that interested, and other things anyway encroach on my time, all the time. But this blog, really, was inspired by Kleon’s challenge: I created this site for the sake of sharing the process behind whatever I’m working on. These are the DVD extras — but, more than that, the real purpose of these posts is to keep me accountable and working.

Here’s something Kurt Vonnegut, quoting an old professor, wrote in his book Timequake and repeated on at least a few other occasions:

“Artists … are people who say, ‘I can’t fix my country or my state or my city, or even my marriage. But by golly, I can make this square of canvas, or this eight-and-a-half-by-eleven piece of paper, or this lump of clay, or these twelve bars of music, exactly what they ought to be!'”

I’ve always liked that. Nevermind that these words are delivered by someone (the professor) who’d in the fullness of time swallow potassium cyanide and die. Life, and people, are complicated. It’s still a fair definition of the artist — even if I could never entirely relate. Rarely if ever have I gotten a sheet of paper, either by way of my words or my drawings, to become what I think it should be. Certainly I can’t control the chaos of the world around me, but most of the time I can’t control, either, a small white sheet of typing paper — or the surface of an empty cardboard box.

(I have a feeling, of course, that the same was true for Vonnegut — perhaps once or twice in his life he managed to wrangle his empty pages into exactly the thing he wanted. But whatever the failures, I imagine the process — and the clunky products at the end — must have been, for him, worthwhile.)

So! We beat on, boats against the current. And! This afternoon, when I could have been doing something less fun, I listened to lots and lots of Roscoe Holcomb, and I fell more deeply in love with — and became more acutely attuned to — his music.

And, this: I made a cardboard box on its way to the garbage much more interesting than it otherwise would have been. Because drawing on a cardboard box — drawing anything! — can always, only, make it better, whatever happens to it next.

And, so: onward!

Share your work. Stay tuned. See you next time.

Peace.

Burgin

P.S. The italicized phrases a few paragraphs above are chapter headings or subheadings from Austin Kleon’s book, Show Your Work.