No video today: I’ve been writing instead. And drawing a bit.
I spent the first part of the morning in the studio copying out a drawing, the second part of the morning getting lost trying to find the post office then getting lost inside the post office trying to send some olololos to London, and the afternoon writing about the drawing. (olololos are these)
I copied the drawing out of a book called Writing on Drawing (ed. S Garner 2008). It’s by a C20 Dutch artist called Armando, who did many of his works with eyes shut or blindfolded. I’d been reading Glyn Maxwell about line breaks in ‘On Poetry’ (2012), a conversational kind of book in which he suggests copying out other people’s poems onto blank paper so you understand how the lines sit in relation to the fullness or emptiness of time that had been contained in the page’s blankness until the words mark it into something different. Then John Berger describes first mark of a drawing like a fish dropped into the glass tank of the blank page, turning the environment from blank water into a condition in which the fish can live. And how adding a second mark isn’t just like dropping another fish into the water; rather it fixes the first firmly in place by relation to itself. That was in ‘Life Drawing’ (1960) — such a different perspective to Derrida’s in ‘Memoirs of the Blind’ (1990) in which drawing emerges from the dark in an act of blindly groping forward, with the pencil breaking a path through blackness.
I copied Armando’s drawing so I can examine these different perspectives first through drawing itself, then through a written account of the process. I’ll be working on the written account for the rest of the week, and hope to have it finished on Friday.
