Accidental Ōsōji
A gloomy day, a messy desk, and suddenly… I caught the bug. Today turned into a mini ōsōji—Japanese-style year-end deep cleaning!
Today in Chicago, it was rainy—which is rare for the winter! I wasn’t feeling too great either, so I stayed home all day.
At one point, I went to move some things over to my work desk, and… it was kind of a mess.
Then I opened my flat file to pull out some prints I’m bringing to the fair in two days, and out of nowhere, I got the sudden urge to tidy everything up! So, I declared today a surprise cleanup day—specifically, my prints and desk space.
In Japan, we have this tradition called “ōsōji,” which is basically a big deep cleaning at the end of the year. In Western countries, people usually do spring cleaning, but in Japan, ōsōji happens at the end of the year to welcome the toshigami-sama (the New Year spirit). So in a way, this was my little version of that!
I just realized—I always print in the same colors! Green, yellow, and fluorescent pink… or orange!
This year, I jumped back into risograph printing for the first time in five years, and now I’ve got a whole collection of work. Some of it turned out great, some of it… less so. I’d been stuffing everything into my flat file, but today I decided to be ruthless: if a print doesn’t spark joy (especially the ones where I did color separation in Spectrolite—oof), it goes straight to the test print pile. I mean, what’s the point in keeping something that I don’t even want to give away and that only bums me out when I look at it?
Still, going through everything made me feel kind of emotional—I really did a lot this year. And at the same time, I felt this wave of motivation to get even better at both illustration and risograph printing.
So yeah… accidental ōsōji, very productive indeed!