One. The magazine will be here Monday.

A year ago, I said: “I’d like to make a magazine.” So, I did.

I love magazines. In our hobby we probably spend too much time searching for a justification to hide our love behind. And there I am, curled up on the couch, tracing a pretend operating session across the face of the layout of the month’s page.

Sometimes I feel like I’m bleeding all my real parts into a virtual space to ironically hope that those who host it, continue to grant me access to it all later. One is an experiment that will only ever be printed to real paper, to be held, released from a behind a glass named cloud. I mean, I’m real, so should this be. I am really excited to see how the printed magazine relates back to the blog and how they interact.

Last fall, I entered into a period of prolonged grief for the loss of The Latest Shove, discovering my love of what it was, was a feeling that ran deeper than I was prepared to face. I doubt my past is a part of my future. If I do discover some artefact from it is desired again, recollecting its parts burns less effort than the ambiguity of “might need it someday” storage. I think, I no longer wanted to be reminded of impermanence. Coupled with that insecurity was an unflattering envy for a life so stable I could, like I have never been able to before, screw benchwork into a final proof of a good anchorage. I like to think I was keeping that petulance private. I’ll never know if my lies ever held up as a truth.

I had to learn to see One as like how and why we make a model railway. Craft skills, flowing from planning and design work into a calculus translating emotional value into models with a feel to touch. The process of expressing feelings into form as a paraphrasing lesson in know how to live inside this life. In a moment, a realised my need for the magazine was like that.

Making One was not a copy-paste job. The magazine is filled with new drawings, new words. I loved making this art so much and that alone powered me through so many moments where I wanted to “not do this anymore”. Even familiar content has been refined to pare away the noise and, I really hope, reveal more of what matters.

I have only printed twenty copies of issue one of One. I am already working on issues two and three. Learning to make it ironically served its identity: Learning to make better models is the process of learning to better see what we’re making models of. Exchanging the prejudice of what I want to see to welcome in a clearer vision of the beautiful and diverse things before me, ironically, is a process that starts by becoming a better model maker but eventually facilitates the making of a better me. That correlation, that’s One.

I learned how much I enjoy making little films, so I made one introducing One. In it, the pages are from my final markup. It was really fun to, quite literally, take them on a tour to some of the places they came from. Places that matter to me, to test if it felt right. And it feels really good.

Chris

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‹ Tree stump

One. It’s here ›

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Categories: How I think, One March 2024