twelve walks

one glimpse each

Walking is one thing that shows me how to make images and that teaches me to think. It creates time. It is a distraction from grief, anxiety, boredom, self-doubt. It’s a physical pleasure. It’s the way I learned to pass Sundays when I first left the US to live elsewhere, days there was no work to go to and everyone else was with their family and friends. It is a practical solution to the problem of not having groceries or wanting to go somewhere. It is a way of understanding where I am and what my relation to place can be. It is my primary mode of transit. Walking is a way of looking, and, because I walk in the same places over and over, it is a way of looking that forces me to find interest in things that sometimes feel very interestless. Walking is an experience of in-the-midstness that has come to be the basis for all the things I think and how I think them.

Walking feels slow but in fact it’s pretty fast. When I’m walking with someone else I can be self-conscious about the fact that I want to stop and look, stop and take photos, stop and write something down, stop and listen or record. But we’re moving fairly quickly even then. Even when I’m on a beeline to the shop for milk, wishing I could go faster, get home faster, I sometimes realize just how much faster walking is than perceiving. I have to remind myself to try to see and not just pass by, even things I think I know.

Drawing is something else that teaches me to see, distracts me from grief, creates my experience of time, helps me understand where I am, forces me to be interested in my everyday life.

So I’ve done something to bring them together, the walking and the drawing. Twelve glimpses from my walks here in Dublin, done at the speed of perception, the speed of walking, and the speed of drawing. Ordinary things: doors and flowers, curtains and birds, made with my ordinary watercolors and a heavy pencil.

From 2010 until 2018 I made a calendar every year and sold copies. In 2021 and 2022, I made calendars that could be downloaded and printed at home for free. In 2023 I didn’t make a calendar. I’ve made these drawings into a calendar for 2024, and from now until Saturday, January 13 at 9 a.m. Irish time (that’s 4 a.m. US Eastern), you can download it for free and print a copy at home or at a copy shop. This calendar is my attempt to translate the quickness of perception at the speed of walking to the page. There is one small drawing each month.

Some details: the format of the file is A4, but you can scale it to print on letter paper; you could also print two pages per page and trim them down on both or all four sides for a calendar slightly smaller than A5. I think a mid-weight paper, 120gsm to 250gsm, would work best, but you should use what you have. The calendar is published under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0 license, so you can print it for your own use but not for sale (full details of the license here).