Last time in the art installment of my newsletter I showed the pages of this sketchbook that came about after I finished the set of pencils I started out with and really didn’t like. They were super hard and lay very little colour down on the paper. This sketchbook has porous pages with a lot of tooth which brought out a little life in those pencils, but it’s also fragile and layers of it come off at too much friction. The pencils needed just that, arduous colour on top of colour for many hours. My wrist almost didn’t let me finish, but I’m stubborn.
After using up this set, which took a long, long time, I wasn’t sure I wanted to honour all the bad art materials I’d gathered when I first started drawing and didn’t know anything (now I know 3% more, but it’s proving substantial in some ways).
Life is very short and as much of a cliche as that is, I have been incredibly aware of it recently. If I had unlimited time I might spend a few centuries simply going off into these sorts of little quests to see what comes of them, but I don’t so I have to reconsider and start using the nice materials I have while I can, then enjoy buying new ones and start again. I hope I’ll never get over it, but for now it’s the most satisfying of things.
This particular side quest has yielded surprising results. I started with geometrical forms (see below the gallery) and then, without making a conscious decision they morphed into more than just basic geometry. This pencil set pushed me, gently, towards things I didn’t, at the time, think I could do. The compositions I was going for didn’t really come to be in the way I envisioned them, but I kept going, from exploration to exploration and they led me to more figurative results. Each page started with questioning forms and what they could be, meaning that I put down a shape, filled it in and then attached another one to it, searching to make it different, to discover one I hadn’t tried before. It’s essentially a “what if” process. What if I go this way, what if I start with half a circle, what if I put this tear drop shape down?
I love being surprised, I love to be delighted by something unexpected, an idea, a gesture, a shape. It’s a short and profound startling, it jolts me, momentarily out of the ruts I’m in, or simply interrupts a little the routine, helping me make it more satisfying, or more me, or to just wake me up a little bit, like an altered state of consciousness. I’m incredibly fond of those, they reshape reality and allow me to explore beyond my regular mental patterns.
One fenomenon that happens when I start a project is that I have a loose or tight mental image of the result, a plan of sorts, but when colour touched page what I’ve intended turns into something else. This is partially because I have no idea what I’m doing and so the image gets translated through my skill level of the moment. It can be frustrating if I’m hung up on that plan, but extremely satisfying when I let myself do what I can. That’s where the surprises come from. All the fumbling is well worth it when I look at the result and wonder where it came from and why it’s somehow better than what I wanted initially.
All of this is actually another way of saying that exploration is my absolute favourite things in the world. This sketchbook was an exercise in letting go and following the line to see where it can take me.
I constantly imagine a life where I’m not sick and limited and I’m also unrestricted by time. In all of those fantasies all I ever want to do is explore. Most of the fantasy books I read are about conflict, which usually translates to war, to conquering, to fighting off conquerors etc., and it gets tedious. It seems pure exploration is not a subject the publishing world appreciates, maybe it cannot be done well, maybe no one has tried.
Exploration, for me, is an openness, it isn’t marred by urgency, pressure, destination, so maybe exploration as a theme, a guiding light, is hard to transform into a page-turning story. Curiosity, anticipation, satisfaction are the adjectives I’d attach to exploration. Some others are quiet repetition, patience, contentment. I’d cultivate those above most others if I were blessed with limitlessness. Only the thought at all that searching, full bodied, meaty, voluptuous blisses me out. How would being able to do it for an eternity, or a quasi-eternity be like?
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