January is always a time of reflection. We reflect on where we’ve been. We contemplate where we’re going. In other words, we look back, we look forward. In fact, we look back in order to look forward more clearly, because context is helpful to how we see and understand things.

    In looking back, I think I’ve understood for the first time that the creation of Leslieness in January of 2008, was as much an act of defiance as it was an act of creativity. I could not get an outside entity to represent who I am, what I do, and what I believe in without having it somehow distorted by those publishing forces, and so I decided to utilize the technology that makes it all so simple to just DIM (Do It Myself). I wanted to take the hours and minutes I’d spent in the years prior pitching and hoping and waiting, and put them straight away into creating, exploring and expressing—more bravely, with less concern for approval, without worrying about if I would or would not be able to deliver on the needs of another. I wanted to really just sing from my heart, sing out the art—art in the biggest and broadest way, art as the most literate form of life. I wanted to plant the seeds of inspiration and water them publicly and watch them grow. I wanted the thoughts that burn so deeply inside my brain to flower on the outside if they could, and give inspiration and or direction to others if at all possible. I wanted to bring to life the elements and principals of art, and explore and express where I felt that art was flowering in the world and why it matters that it continues to do so. This sandbox that I called Leslieness, would give me a chance, I hoped, to come closer to expressing the fullness of who I am as an artist and give me a bit of a platform to celebrate literate expression.

    I’m already off to a bit of a slow start with two trips having kept me from the keyboard, but ah, what trips! With new sights, sounds, understandings still percolating in my brain—I hope to rev up quickly and get off to a reinvigorated and deepened year of seeing.