Are we loosing our capacity for making physical art?
This is a question I have been wondering for years, and now with AI this question arises with more frequency.
As a millennial, born in the 90's and growing up in the early 2000's letter writing and scrapbooking were big parts of my life. With the advent of digital cameras and e-mail both writing by hand and having physical copies of photography started to fade away. The luddite in me held on to both and, now at 32 years old I still keep these traditions alive in my own way.
But, why does it even matter?
I will be the first to admit that my profession as a content creator greatly decreases the time I spend making art. When I was in college (2010-2014) my friends and I would sit around our living room, making collages, painting, and drawing on a weekly basis. In my free time I would draw on recycled paper and use water colors to liven up my notes for school. It was second nature to me.
Now I have to make a conscious effort to set aside time for journaling and that is exactly what I did yesterday morning!
As always I have several different notebooks in the works. One is a bullet journal where I keep track of my to-do lists. Now I am adding a new personal challenge to draw little doodles beside each and every day that I track in that journal.
Besides the bullet journal I have my writing book where I jot down ideas and flush out articles for my online work both here and the other platforms I write for. And, another new addition to 2025, is a scrapbook/journal where I am actually printing out images taken with my phone and committing them to the realm of physical art rather than letting them float around in the archives of my computer.
Alongside each photograph I am leaving space to reflect. In these spaces I process the feelings and emotions that came up on a recent trip to see two of my most dear friends who, due to a variety of circumstances I haven't seen in person since 2019! It was just a short trip of three days but, so much happened, so many conversations I want to remember forever and a great deal of healing took place. To me there is no better way to conserve all of that than in a book of living memories.
