the essential struggle

(..) the essential struggle is private and bears no relation to anyone else's. it is of necessity a solitary and lonely endeavor to explore one's own sensibility, to discover how it works and to implement honestly its manifestations.

 

: anne truitt, daybook (p. 63)

beautiful things

 

a moth, roots, rain, and prismacolor premier pencils. i think these prismacolors are the cutest pencils i've ever seen, & their colours are just spectacular (i only have these two colours but i'm very much in love with the pink one and i'm very picky when it comes to pink). i haven't yet figured out how to keep the points short and broad and cute, like they were when i got them; my sharpener doesn't do cute.

where my pencil touches the paper

‘consciousness seems to me increasingly inconceivable. i know more and more that i know nothing of its nature, range, and force except what i experience through the slot of this physical body. the tie to my body may feel stronger than it is. so it seems anyway when i remember how i occasionally hold myself separate from it. yet i balk.

 ... here, where my pencil touches the paper, is the place at which a body holds itself intact. the line marks, with infinite tenderness, the experience of a body—a separate unknowable experience inside the line, space outside it.’

— anne truitt, daybook. the journal of an artist