I flew to Paris in June for a trade show I mostly didn't enjoy, and came home three weeks later with almost nothing from the show itself and everything from the four days I wandered around afterward, once the appointments were done and I had no reason left to be anywhere in particular. I hailed a taxi outside a hotel on a street I couldn't tell you the name of now, arm up, coat pulled tight against a wind that hadn't gotten the memo it was supposed to be summer, and something about that one ordinary gesture — reaching, waiting, being seen before being answered — stuck with me longer than any of the actual jewelry I saw in any window that week.
I collect cities the way some people collect souvenirs, except what I bring home isn't a magnet or a postcard, it's a color, or the particular geometry of ironwork on a balcony, or the sound a certain kind of heel makes on wet cobblestone. None of it turns into a sketch immediately, or ever, most of the time. I used to feel guilty about that — like a trip that didn't produce a drawing had failed at its job. I've stopped believing that. Most of what a city gives me sits somewhere unlabeled for months before I even notice it resurfacing in something I'm making.
What actually finishes the thinking, more often than not, isn't the gathering part. It's the opposite of it. Two weeks after Paris I was somewhere with almost no reason to think at all — water instead of pavement, a wooden walkway instead of a sidewalk, nothing on the agenda that couldn't be undone by staying an extra hour in the same chair. I didn't sketch once the whole time I was there, on purpose. I've learned that if I try to force the ideas to arrive on schedule, in a pretty setting, they get self-conscious and go quiet. They only actually show up once I've stopped waiting for them.
It was on the walk back to the room one evening, barefoot on warm wood, that a shape finally settled — nothing dramatic, just a curve I'd been failing to get right in a dozen sketches over the spring, suddenly obvious in a way it hadn't been at a desk. I still don't have a name for the piece it'll become. It exists right now as three lines in the notebook I keep for exactly this kind of thing, an offshoot of Arina's Library that never gets tidied or organized, just added to. I like that it's still formless. I'll know what to call it once gold tells me.
I need both halves, I think, more than I used to admit. The noise of somewhere new, and then enough stillness afterward for whatever I picked up along the way to actually settle into something. One without the other doesn't work — all city and I end up with a drawer of fragments I never use; all quiet and I've got nothing to think about in the first place. So I keep doing both, a little clumsily, a little out of order, and trusting that whatever I bring home eventually finds its way to the bench.
— Arina
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