Saturday, January 2, 2021

New Work: Dates in a Life Waking Project 2020



The Dates in a Life Waking Project 2020 is a year-long painting project documenting the number of steps I walked each day.

The painting is created with monoprinted textures of a construction fence as the background, handstamped rubber erasers on fabric which are collaged on the background grid, as well as handpainting and stitching on stiffened fabric. It measures 30.5” x 38.5".

I prefer to walk for exercise, as time permits, outside in addition to whatever other walking I do as I go about my day. My goal is to walk as much as I can every day. I keep track of steps with the Pedometer app in my iPhone.

I use a system of symbols to represent each thousand steps. Instead of showing exactly how many I walk. The black icons represent up to 9999 steps walked each day, red represents 10,000-19,999 steps and yellow represents 20,000-29,999 steps.

The daily background color changes each day represent the number of floors I climbed by tens. Turquoise is for 1-10 floors, Green is for 11-20, Indian Yellow is for 21-30 and Red is for 31+ floors.

Under some individual days, there is paint to represent reasons that may lower or raise the number of steps I walked that day, such as snow or rainy, extreme hot or cold, illness. I’ve began working at home on March 17th due to Covid-19, and used silver paint to reflect that if there weren’t other reasons.

The yellow dots on this painting show how many miles I rode my bike that day. I bought a bike on May 26th after not riding since 1984.