Borrowed Eyes

I keep a visual art journal — watercolour paintings, rough sketches, colour experiments I barely remember making.

Months later, I’ll flip back through the pages and feel like a stranger. The hand that made these marks doesn’t feel like mine. The choices surprise me. Some of it I like more than I did at the time. Some of it I can see clearly isn’t working, in ways I couldn’t have named when I made it.

David Lynch once said he doesn’t always know what his films mean — and that he’s okay with that. The work carries something he can’t fully claim.

I think that’s what distance does. It returns your work to you as a stranger might see it — without your defensiveness, without your memory of the effort, without your attachment to the original intention.

We tend to judge our own work from too close. We see the mistakes we made, not the effect we created. We know too much.

Those borrowed eyes — the ones you grow into months later — might be the most honest feedback you’ll ever get.

The question is whether you’re willing to wait for them.