For this assignment, the prompt was to “go somewhere and draw 50 things.” I thought about going to my parents’ house, but I wasn’t sure how to illustrate “arguments” so I defaulted to my second option: the grocery store. There are few places I can walk into and be so immediately paralyzed by choice like my local Wegmans. I could easily generate 50 doodles of cereal boxes or mysterious Asian sauces if I were so inclined. Instead, I decided to take this opportunity to drill down and pay attention to the smaller details of a grocery store that typically get filtered out as white noise: symbols, signage, tools, demo stations, entire rows of products I generally overlook (I tend to treat the Gluten Free aisle like someone handing out fliers on a New York City street: Head down, avoiding eye contact, flailing my arms and shouting “no thank you!” as I hustle past.).
I often find myself frustrated by the shopping experience at popular establishments in the Northern Virginia area, where the store floor becomes a microcosm of our roadways. Just a bunch of inconsiderate, oblivious and highly aggressive people careening about wildly having substituted a shopping cart for their Lexus SUV. Costco might as well advertise itself as a demolition derby. As a result, my regular routine has become an episode of Supermarket Sweep, in which I make a calculated sprint through the store, scooping armfuls of necessities into the basket before blasting off to the next location in a race against the clock. This project caused me to slow down, observe my surroundings, and engage in a sense of awareness I’d long replaced with muscle memory. It’s amazing what you notice when you take the time to focus. Did you know that human beings actually work amidst this chaos? Stalwart souls who position their soft, frail bodies in the paths of screeching metal, attempting to place pork rinds on a shelf as they are ripped from their hands by a ravenous horde. There are broken things on the floor. What was once a recognizable food item or product packaging, through the transformative power of foot traffic, has achieved new life as a colorful smear or fine powder. I was surprised to discover a questionably hygienic number of small dogs. Shopping bags, shopping carts, coolers, dishware, and cutlery: the things that move food but are afterthoughts in a place that sells it. I tried to take in as much as I could, and reproduce it from memory in a calmer environment when I got home.
I’m of mixed minds on whether I should have used a bigger sketchbook for this project. On the one hand, for a process intended to concentrate on details, it feels like a mistake to use pages too small for me to render them. On the other hand, being forced to capture quick, simplistic impressions mandates the use of what may be a valuable filter. It reduces objects to their most iconic forms, allowing me to register more of the things I rarely register at all.