Leslie Roberts. Datebook project. 2020. Small daily list drawings. ink, colored pencil, marker on graph paper. 3x4 inches.

The Datebook project is a series of small, intensely colorful drawings on graph paper titled after everyday compilations of tracked information during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, ranging from to-do lists to instances of anxiety. Borrowing language from and yet indecipherable as standard data visualization, each glitched tapestry of a drawing follows Roberts’ shifting translations from alphabet to color. Asked about her approach in an interview by Scott Robinson for Painting Is Dead, Roberts paraphrases writer Flannery O’Connor: “I am like the little old lady who says ‘I never know what I think until I see what I say.’” These drawings are a way of seeing what is being said through the oft-ignored accumulations of the perfunctory marginalia of lived experience.