Notes On Containers

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​A few years ago I set out to draw 100 containers in 100 days. I had a few things in mind. One was simply to practice drawing. I don’t have much drawing training, and it doesn’t come naturally to me. But it does change the way I see and think, so I keep working at it. I chose containers because they are close at hand, provide the kinds of shapes that I’d been trying to understand visually, and because I hoped that contemplating these everyday objects would be a way to focus on the opaqueness of many systems that shape our lives - invisible labor, unknown ingredients, impenetrable financial mechanisms. I will say that in the scramble to draw something every day, this “big idea” pretty much fell away. This feels typical of the upsides and downsides to 100-day projects. They help sustain incremental pieces of creative work in the face of life’s other daily demands. At the same time, they may not be so useful in making progress on lumpier, more complicated, non-distillable projects. Perhaps some residue of the larger idea floats around the drawings. I think the process at least helped me to hold these questions in mind. And I did make a little bit of progress at drawing cylinders and boxes in perspective…