Time and Time Again
Alex Hinders, 2013.
Colored pencil, pen, and computer.
When I had finished coloring the initial drawing, pictured first above, I felt that it was more cryptic than usual. I’ve certainly had a fair number of drawings that I have no idea what they represent or are supposed to mean, but this felt different somehow. It was like I was missing something or I wasn’t seeing the full picture.
I found my personal answers for this drawing after having scanned the image twice. On my computer screen I had the folder with the scans up and I saw the two images side by side — although one was upside down, as I had laid it in the scanner a different way. I realized that the parts of the blue wheel could connect with rotated versions of itself. In other words, my sub-conscious had created a drawing with rotational symmetry.
So I digitally rotated the image and pasted it together to get the larger image you see. The image feels complete this way. I can now see that the drawing was trying to detail how we humans are creatures of habit, and we go about preforming the same mistakes over and over. Then there are times where we think we’ve learned our lesson by repeating these mistakes so many times, but in truth, we haven’t — or we forget — and then we go about continuing to repeat those same mistakes again anyway. I also considered the name “The Same Mistakes; The Same Solutions” before deciding on “Time and Time Again.”
You’ll notice that the second image has some darker lines and other small differences than the original drawing. I wasn’t entirely happy with how the scanner picked up some of the details and decided since I was already digitally altering the image that I might as well make a few more tweaks while I was at it.