What are you working on? What are you learning? What did you have to leave behind?

ANCORA IMPARO is the online journal that explores the artist as scholar and the artistic process as ongoing enlightenment. ANCORA IMPARO juxtaposes an excerpt of your work with your commentary. The journal promotes art’s process as rich and fruitful, and increases the appeal of skill and craft without lowering the bar. ANCORA IMPARO is bringing discovery back, reminding us that thinking is sexy. We’ve taken the title from Michelangelo, who wrote it in the margin of a sketch in process: “I am still learning.” Our contributors offer a glimpse into their projects as well as a short essay exploring the genesis, process, tangents, and remnants of those projects.

The artistic process can be as interesting and rewarding as the end result. The exploration and discovery involved in generating a work of art is a key pleasure, but often those tangents and scholarship lie, by necessity and revision, outside the work itself. We’re creating a space to celebrate this aspect of the artistic process alongside the art. ANCORA IMPARO is a place to discuss your own experiences, and to read with pleasure other equally provocative explorations.

For example, for his poem “In Santa Maria del Popolo,” Thom Gunn might have done some thinking about Caravaggio, churches, old devout Italian women, chiaroscuro, even other artists, art in general, faith, etc. Not all of that marginalia made it into his poem, but it’s likely that these explorations and others were equally interesting to him. We’d like to hear what Gunn would tell us about what he was learning, about any of this, while writing that poem.

We wonder: What did you leave on the cutting room floor?

If you are interested in being a part of this conversation, please consider submitting to ANCORA IMPARO.


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Editor: Amy Newman

Assistant Editors: Lynn Williams and Ray Draper

Design: Jamie Bowman

“What fell away” remix: petal image courtesy Flickr Creative Commons.