The Quiet Act
I don’t know how else to get the feelings out other than to grab an instrument of art.
When I’m happy, when I’m meloncholic, when I’m grieving, when I’m content, when I feel joy and sadness.
It all wants to leave my body.
Art is an act of embodiment. An act of silence, a quiet act.
Unlike many other artists and creatives, I don’t plan out what I create. It’s not premeditated or a neat process for me. It is intuitive, feeling, experimentational, not concerned with the outcome or the piece created. Not concerned in as much as that a scribble is just as valuable as a completed piece.
The quiet act is about the act.
I do like to learn new things and will take courses when I can or feel like it to receive intensive instruction on an art process that’s intriguing me at the moment. Sometimes I learn something new and stick with it for a time, other times I don’t, I just let it go. I may come back to it later.
The quiet act is fleeting, it’s lasting, it’s full of contradictions, it’s whatever I want it to be. There are rules and no rules. It’s freedom.
Below is a video of a quiet act that developed over months.
In many ways it was building up inside of me, I could feel the pressure.
It lived with me.
It was silent and loud.
It was familiar and disdained.
ICE cold
He disappeared in the dead of winter
[the dead of winter]
[the dead of winter]
The brooks were frozen…
And snow disfigured the public statues;
The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day
What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day
-W.H. Auden
ICE cold
ICE cold
ICE cold
[Alex Pretti, Renee Good, Keith Porter, heber Sanchaz Dominguez, Victor Manuel Diaz, Parady La, Luis Beltran Yanez-Cruz, Luis Gustavo Nunez caceres, Geraldo lunas Campos]
Artist Book by: Vanesa Simon
Newark, Delaware
01/28/2026
Excerpt of poem by: W.H. Auden
Handmade cover & accordion style book: gel mono print, Higgins blue drawing ink, Sakura Micron pen.
