DOUG BRIN: The Journals

Doug Brin, age 26, 1973

What follows is a representative sample of my journals.

I call them JOURNALS because they include an overriding visual content.

As both an artist and writer, I feel their unique format best reflects my dual identity as a creative person.

They comprise a visual diary.

My motives, perseverance, and preference for maintaining these annual volumes for over half-a-century, uninterrupted comprise:

. The desire to leave a physical record of my life and times.

and thus—hopefully (!)—to gain a measure of immortality

. A hope that this particular means of self-expression and self-awareness will illuminate my persona

. An aim to expose an interior life in the context of the exterior world in which that more intimate existence is necessarily submerged

Looking back these many years, I hope this project comprising my entire adult lifetime has expanded my horizons; and included the hopes, fears, and aspirations of others, as well.

I’ve endeavored to include entries that mirror events in the larger world, and frequently, as they’ve been reflected and interpreted in current periodicals and literature as well.

A journal is undeniably directed at posterity, more than an audience of one. Its creator has an eye on eventual publication, as a form of autobiography, perhaps the material for a future biographer, or—in my case—of interest to a visual curator.

By now, in what I term my life’s work, these volumes comprise thousands of pictorial design spreads containing illustration and collage; and collectively, millions of words, many quoting from literary and journalistic sources.

I have not hesitated to include the frustrations, disappointments, and embarrassments entailed in trying to navigate a life that’s included at least five career paths, countless jobs, raising two children primarily on my own; and six-hour brain surgery that left me more dead than alive, and necessitated a circuitous road back to recovery.

As someone constantly aware of the universal shadow of mortality, it is a comfort to know I will leave this record behind me.