There are moments in life that don’t feel like they happened years ago. They feel like they happened in another lifetime. On March 8, 1983, I stood in the crowd at The Old Lady On Brady in Tulsa, Oklahoma watching the Stray Cats tear through a set that permanently rewired…
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This is my annual Earthstrong (birthday) blog post. Many of you may not be familiar with the word Earthstrong, what it means and where it came from. The Jamaican term “Earthstrong” is a beautiful example of how language reflects a worldview. While it is commonly used to mean “birthday,” its…
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It has come to my attention—after a thorough investigation involving coffee, staring at a blank screen, and one suspicious nap—that I have not posted any here in five days. Construction of new studio space has disrupted the normal flow here temporarily. But here’s the “real” story: Five days of posts…
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The phrase “the art life” feels older than it sounds, but its current popularity owes a lot to David Lynch and his documentary David Lynch: The Art Life. What’s interesting is that the phrase didn’t arrive as a formal movement or theory—it emerged more like studio slang that finally found…
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The distinction between a symbol and a sign is subtle at first glance, but foundational once seen clearly. Both are carriers of meaning. Both point beyond themselves. But they do so in fundamentally different ways—one by agreement and precision, the other by resonance and depth. A sign is direct. It…
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Across cultures, eras, and disciplines, a small vocabulary of shapes recurs again and again in symbolic systems. These are not arbitrary. They are the result of how human perception organizes the world—how we see boundaries, directions, forces, and relationships. Each shape carries a set of tendencies, not fixed meanings but…
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A symbol is not merely a mark, an image, or a thing—it is a bridge. It stands in one place while pointing somewhere else, carrying meaning across a gap between the visible and the invisible, the concrete and the abstract. A symbol allows something to be seen that cannot, in…
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Number One: Pursue Obsession Without Apology The subjects that return to you uninvited — the ones you feel almost embarrassed by their persistence — are precisely the ones worth pursuing. A personal visual language is built from obsession, not from subjects deemed appropriately serious or commercially viable. The embarrassing preoccupation…
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One might ask why this matters — whether it is not, finally, a self regarding project, a kind of extended navel-gazing with better materials. The answer is that a genuine personal visual language is one of the most outward-facing things a human being can produce. When you construct a language…
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Eric Hatheway