20 Years Ago I Bought a Tank of Gas at the BP Station on Hwy 82 in Starkville, Mississippi and Decided to Draw It

On daily drawing, attention, embarrassment, coffee, and the strange comfort of repetition.

This is just February 5th from each year since 2006 (the day this project started) — pulled from the digital piles.

It was 2004, and I was 26, and I had started drawing my credit card statements as a kind of punishment. Every month, these machine-generated envelopes would arrive in my mailbox announcing, in cold laser-printed type, exactly how I had failed at being responsible with money. The numbers felt official and final, like there wasn’t much room for interpretation or redemption.

Detail of one of my Credit Card Statement installations from around 2006 or so.

So I began redrawing them line by line, with pen and ink and sharing them on Flickr (remember Flickr? Every day I miss that era of the internet).

It felt like the opposite of the machine. No one could mistake my drawings for an actual statement; they were wobbly and imperfect, obviously made by my hand. If I was going to stare at those numbers and feel terrible, I wanted to insert myself back into the equation somehow.

I chose drawing because it was my least favorite way to make things. It felt slow and awkward and a little exposed. But after a few months of drawing those statements, something shifted. I started to appreciate the pace of it, the quiet of being alone with the page, the repetition of lines and numbers and type that I would never actually use again. Somewhere in there, I tricked myself into actually liking to draw.

In 2010, Princeton Architectural Press published a book with three years of my Daily Purchase Drawings. You can still find copies floating around the internet.

About two years into drawing my credit card statements, I realized I wanted to draw something else, too. Something that wasn’t just the evidence of my spending, but the actual things I was bringing into my life. So on February 5th, 2006, I drew a tank of gas I bought that day, and that drawing became the start of the daily purchase project.

Glamor shot of some of my sketchbooks taken by my buddy Ben Sellon, who co-owns Halfcourt Studio next door to Outlet.

I made a few simple rules: black pen, white paper, no do-overs. I would put the drawings on the internet, put them in a zine, and share them. That was it. I would draw something I purchased every day.

There are now thousands of drawings behind me and, if I keep going, thousands more ahead.

Over time those drawings have documented marriage, changing jobs, moving across the country, traveling, opening Outlet, becoming a parent, and raising Hank, life and death. They have recorded friendships as much as they have recorded toilet paper, cough drops, Tylenol, plane tickets, special dinners, and the occasional splurge that I justified heavily in the captions.

Above: A quick sketchbook flip through from this summer when Hank was running around in our neighborhood park, and I was camped out on a blanket drawing.

Some of the drawings are pretty bad, some days I clearly phoned it in, and some purchases are embarrassing. I have drawn an alarming number of coffees, Diet Cokes, and tote bags. But that’s part of it. The object is rarely the point; the act of noticing is.

A bunch of my old Tri-Met bus receipts, circa 2008, 2009, and before everything turned into an app.

A receipt is flimsy, temporary, designed to be thrown away within hours. It mostly exists to prove that money moved from one place to another. But when you draw it, you’re not documenting the transaction so much as the context. Where you were. What you needed. Whether you were exhausted, celebrating, restless, or just running errands.

This was part of a drawing project where I did a call for folks to share images of their favorite mugs and I would draw them.

A mug isn’t just ceramic and glaze. It’s the one you reach for every morning without thinking. It’s the chipped one you keep anyway. It’s the thrift store find that somehow feels like it has always belonged to you. When you draw it, you slow down long enough to notice the curve of the handle, the thickness of the rim, the weird scratch you’ve never paid attention to before.

Drawing doesn’t elevate the object. It just gives it time.

That’s the part that matters.

Drawn three weeks after Hank was born.

It doesn’t have to be accurate — you’re making a drawing, not a photograph. If the packaging feels overwhelming, you don’t have to render every detail. You can draw the outline, the bold word, and the dent in the corner. You get to decide what stays and what disappears.

Over time, the project became less about the purchases themselves and more about the pause: a few minutes at the end of the day with a black pen on white paper, no do-overs, one small thing acknowledged.

In 2014, on the eight-year anniversary, I stopped. I told myself it had run its course and that eight years felt solid and complete. I thought I was done.

40th birthday drawing and my return to the project.

On August 12th, 2017 — my 40th birthday — I started again, not because I needed a dramatic reinvention arc or had a plan to reach twenty years, but because I missed it. I missed the quiet, the ritual, and the feeling of having one small practice that was mine and repeatable and stubbornly consistent.

So I returned.

Last week marked twenty years since that first tank of gas, and it feels strange to celebrate anything right now. The news cycle is loud. The future feels slippery. But this project is steady. It’s black pen, white paper, one small purchase at a time, and that repetition keeps me grounded.

When everything feels chaotic, I can still draw the coffee I bought, or the checked pouch, or the Nebraska tote, or the tube of toothpaste. I can still make a small mark and acknowledge that this happened and that I was here to notice it.

The image at the top of this post shows February 5th from each year since 2006, pulled from the digital piles. I’ve been digging through twenty years of drawings, finding the same date over and over again. It’s strange to see them lined up; the line quality has changed a bit, the handwriting has shifted, and the purchases have not dramatically evolved. But the act itself remains the same: black pen, white paper, no do-overs.

Twenty years later, drawing is no longer my least favorite way to create. It’s my favorite thing to do.

And tonight, like always, I’ll draw one item that I bought today. In black pen. On white paper. No do-overs.