On Becoming the Box
The Evolution of team Meeting Doodles
It started out with Austin Kleon’s brick notes during marketing team meetings when I was still a graphic designer at an energy financing company. To really remember something I would write it into doodles, sketches, other illustrated words. At the end of the meeting I would remember more and even see things I hadn’t before when I was writing or drawing. As time went on and as I moved forward from that job to pursue art, the brick notes transformed into windows into other worlds, inner worlds, the subconscious, and even points in history where I existed as different iterations of myself forming a line that would eventually bring me to Now.
When I started taking notes this way I was also very inspired by poetry. A lot of these drawings have a visual cadence that lend themselves to the words I chose for each piece. Over the years I became less focused on the poetry of words and more focused on the visual language of the images that started to appear in the frames. Eventually these frames became the art, morphing into faces that have begun to reach beyond old meeting notes. Rather than stepping outside of the box my work became the box.
My mark-making, in turn, has become an act of unpacking my identity as a Gay Filipino cisgender man living and practicing in San Diego, California. I’ve started learning Baybayin, a pre-colonial Filipino script. This collection of consonants has sounds which can be modified by marks either above or below the character called a kudlit. I thought of my work acting in similar ways, changing their visual sounds by marks of ink, spilled paint, or shifted pixels, changing meanings within each work to speak to as many different people as possible.
