Taking Inventory

From my sketchbook: 2025 Word of the Year in file folder labels, Holbein Gouache in Opera and Crayola Crayons

I don’t set New Years Resolutions, but I do like to meditate on a word and let one float to the surface. This year, the word that announced itself was Inventory. It sounds a little dry, like clipboards and spreadsheets, but I have jumped into Inventory headfirst like it’s my job. I’m making it my job actually, pushing aside my real employment to devote hours a day to the Inventory Practice. Something about the actuarial nature of it allows me to feel more comfortable with the words “I’m Doing Inventory” than “I’m Making Art”, and I certainly carve more time out for it this way. 

I have a lot of things and stuff. I love objects. I have a terrible memory for life events but I can always remember where I bought something, who I was with, why I wanted it when I hold an object. I have a deep attachment to childhood things: Fisher Price, Playmobile, Barbies, children’s books, the smell of my Cabbage Patch Kids head, still. I like physical media: 16mm film, filmstrips, 78/33/45rpm records, photo slides, books, magazines, catalogs, yearbooks, zines. I like being surrounded by button collections, business self-inking stamps, Swingline staplers and old suitcases. I have wondered why, but the best I can come up with is the connection to memory.

I started drawing my collections and cataloging my kids books into Library Thing before the LA fires, but it occurs to me that I’m trying to hold these objects one more time so I can be ready to release them. Clearing out your Mom’s house as she lies in the hospital, unable to spend her final months on Earth with all the things that gave her joy, will remind you that they are, in fact, Just Things. Flammable, dissolvable, donatable things. I have literally hyperventilated in a transfer station, watching bulldozers and men in safety vests try to wrangle all the Things we needed and then did not need anymore, and I will never go there again. But still, I collect Things..

And now I draw the Things. I can’t draw, not really, but this project reminds me that if you get the general idea of an object and squint your eyes a little, you can make lines on paper that sort of look like the actual object. Like badges, and fishing lures and notebooks and jingle bells.

It occurs to me that way before Inventory was a twinkle in 2025’s eye, my last few ‘zines - wait, all my ‘zines??? - are Inventory-adjacent. Visible Storage, indeed. All the Pencils I Own (as of August 26, 2024), Things We Took From the Car, The End, Martin Ritt: Watching, Ranking and Discussing Every Single One of Martin Ritt’s Movies (all available for ordering, please feel free to help me continue inventorying and also clearing out my house). So maybe it’s not just my word for 2025, but the actually guiding principle of all my art and interest, converging in one concept, at last, at long last, making sense of it all.