CBH68
What and Why?
CBH68 is a maker’s mark — initials and a year, the kind of thing stamped into the bottom of something handmade. What lives here is the body of work that gathered around it over time. Field notes and photographs. Watercolor and illustration. Film. Audio. Essays that started as scribbles in the margins of notebooks. Things that didn’t fit anywhere else and ended up here instead.
Over time, certain threads started gathering together naturally.
Field notes ended up near maps and essays. Illustrations drifted toward prints and stickers. River stories became films. Audio projects accumulated in their own little corner. Eventually the sections named themselves — Notes From the Field, Fieldmark Studio, Dogpaddle Productions, Saluda Sounds.
They overlap constantly. That’s part of the point. A note becomes a painting. A river becomes a film. A sketch turns into a sticker. Follow the threads long enough and most of it eventually circles back on itself.
Why does it exist? Probably compulsion more than intention. There’s a particular unease that comes from experiencing something and leaving no mark behind — from being somewhere and knowing memory alone won’t hold it completely. A photograph. A sketch. A field note. A recording. This became the place where those marks accumulated.
It’s also just a different way of being present. Slower than a feed. Less optimized. More like handing someone a notebook than broadcasting to a room.
I’ve never felt entirely at home with social media. Not because I dislike it, but because most experiences mean more to me than the quick version of them. The things I care about usually need a little time, context, and reflection before they feel complete enough to share honestly.
A photograph often needs the field notes beside it. A river trip makes more sense with the map, the weather, the bad coffee, the wrong turn, the conversation at the takeout, and the thing I didn’t realize mattered until much later.
That kind of sharing doesn’t fit especially well into quick posts and disappearing fragments. At least not for me.
This space allows for something slower and more complete. A place where projects can carry their surrounding texture with them instead of being reduced to a highlight or caption.
Anyway… poke around a bit. Things are still accumulating.
There’s probably coffee somewhere nearby.
