IlluminatedOrigin
Darwin Day, February 12, 2022
This year feels a little bit different than the last time I made this update, but after two years of global pandemic, it's difficult to say what should feel normal.
After 11 years of working on this project, there have been many times I have thought about giving up. This year, as difficult as it was to admit, I realized that I was not happy with the writing. The "hand" was irregular with clear signs that I had not made final decisions about things like how the a's should be formed and how prominently to dot the i's. Small details, yes, but without a clear deicsion about every single letter and letter combination, the overall texture and ease of writing suffer. I almost gave up.
I had a realization in the last year that has renewed my optimism about the excruciating pace of this project. Every time I started and stopped over the last 11 years felt like a failure. I thought I was getting nowhere. I was reminded by a friend that iterations are a natural part of the artistic process. If you're making a book, you make a model. You figure out what's not working. You make another one and another until you get it the way you want it. The same is true for sculpture, poetry, ship-building, anything. I was familiar with this, having gone through it numerous times with smaller books and paintings, but the scale of this particular project made the iterative process nearly invisible to me.
Since October I have been reading Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle in “real time,” meaning that I started reading on October 24, 2022 to coincide with the first entry Darwin made the same day in 1832. Every day I read the entry that Darwin wrote and I make a short observation about my project in a 5-year journal to coincide with Darwin’s 5-year voyage ending on November 7, 1836.
Darwin did not mention his own birthday in his entry for today, February 12, 1832:
I'm happy to say that I’m finally fulfilling my dream of finishing this book. With concerted focus and effort over the last several months I have proven to myself that it can be done and done in a way that will honor Darwin and his legacy. In a sense, I’ve started over, but I’ve also reached the end of an iterative cycle that has taken 11 years.
This renewed commitment has required continuous and focused dedication. I have been writing out two pages a week and I will begin painting the borders on those pages in the summer. The border designs have also gone through many versions and in December, over an intentional break from working on the project, I got the idea that had been eluding me all this time about how to tie the visual elements of each chapter together. I will be spending the next few months working hard to demonstrate to myself that it works. I think it will and I’m excited about sharing it when it does.
I can see that in the last 11 years I have made accomplishments, like finishing a diploma in botanical art, observing and filming the movements of several plants, and making detailed studies.
There has been little swell on the sea today, & I have been very uncomfortable. This has tired and quite overcome the small stock of patience that the early parts of the voyage left me. Here I have spent three days in painful indolence, whilst animals are staring me in the face, without labels and scientific epitaphs.
It’s funny how often Darwin’s entries are metaphorical reflections of how I’m feeling about my project. He has ups and downs, good days and bad. After a period of focus on his work, Darwin realizes that he has forgotten to worry about how the Cholera outbreak might be affecting his friends and family at home. He is happiest on land and miserable at sea. Life happens. We suffer, the world around us suffers, and over time, with some luck thrown in, the work gets done.
Kelly
P.S. If you would like to contribute a bit of luck,
please stop by The Humanist Scribe on Etsy
where I’ve started offering small pieces for sale.
Kelly M. Houle 2021
Plums with Colorado Bluebird
8 x10 in, oil on Belgain linen
Private Collection
Then, I listened to a podcast that led me to seek the help of a particularly wise and effecttive creative coach. I started working with her in September of this year.
In November I began rewriting the manuscript pages.
New manuscript pages drying in a drawer