Gilding in and of itself isn’t precious to me. When I was a faux finisher I, on more than one occasion, gilded an entire bathroom. It’s actually kind of gruelling work to gild a ceiling, and the cruel joke of it is that when you’re done, you come home sneezing 24 karat gold.

That said, I know how to gild, I have gilding materials and it makes any dumb drawing precious. My idea was to make an image with space for writing and not to even consider what I was going to write in that space until the image was done.

I thought about painting my cat, but that just seemed too crazy cat lady, even for me. Still, the things I like to draw the most are animals, and my cat, aside from being totally precious to me, has right now the strange grace of a creature about to die. It’s painful to see how fragile he’s become, but there’s a beauty to that fragility, that clumsiness, which is a thing I’ve always been obesessed with. So I decided to, in sort of bestiary style, paint some awkward birds, birds falling. The plan was to leave myself a space on this precious page for words and then to try to fill it.

Without going into detail, though, from the beginning of this project to the end of it, my week got much worse.  I had wanted to compose something for the particular space, but for some reason, I kept being drawn to a paragraph I’d written in my first novel, which I revised for this image.

I read recently about an imagined bestiary of affects.  I picture this as sort of a page of that bestiary, the page titled “grief.” Here it is:

But hmpf– gold looks so much more lovely than in a photograph.  The cheap trick doesn’t really work here.

The thing I found most strange is that I had a particular amount of space and I had to fill that space with words that fit.  This was hard to do, and, in fact, I cheated and gilded a blank space because my words weren’t long enough, and though I originally wrote it in pencil, the erasure marks show on this kind of paper.