Sometimes when I’m working in my art journals, certain words seem to arrange themselves into startlingly appropriate phrases.
“New York began to cry” is one of those. It feels like it could be a title for a collection of pages I’ve made during the pandemic, or the twentieth anniversary of 9/11, or, or, or….
The other two are less discovered and more assembled, although there’s a certain amount of chance involved with what scraps of words my hands will find. “The intrinsic nature of something” is in my handwriting, and looks to be part of a definition of something that I jotted down on a magazine page. “By their arbitrary light” is part discovered on the page itself — this is an altered book, I guess I should have said — combined with some other words.