I asked a local artist to meet with me today and help me think through what I’m trying to do. It can help to get someone else’s eyes on the problem. I had been starting to feel like I have a mish-mash of symbols and am trying to squeeze them all into one papercut. They were happy to meet with me, and it gave me an opportunity to describe from the beginning what I was trying to do and what ideas I’d considered. Because the artist isn’t Jewish and doesn’t know much about Judaism, I also was forced to explain things that I might have otherwise simply been taken for granted. Even though the papercut I hope to create is aimed at a Jewish audience, this is still a valuable exercise in fully thinking through what I’m doing.

Ultimately, even though no immediate solutions came from this meeting, it was still an helpful experience. Some of the directions I’d considered are now fully gone, after having been more closely examined, and the other artist gave me some other directions to put into the hopper to consider, including: finding away to connect the stripes on a tallit with the stripes of prison bars and the stripes of the old prison uniform; putting the numbers from the back of a prison uniform onto the back of a tallit.

Now that it’s the middle of December and I still don’t have a solid design idea, I’m feeling pretty stressed out about this art piece! And I’m about to leave for a two-week trip with family. Maybe I can think more about this on the trip. Plus, one family member is also an artist, one who often focuses on minimalism, or distilling ideas down to their most pure essence. Perhaps some discussion with him will also help