February 10, 2024 Read Time:
Two winters ago, in the embrace of a Covid lockdown, my youngest son and I started making A2-size drawings in which he draws a series of abstract connected shapes in pencil (often "taking a line out for a walk," often something else), I ink the lines, and we color the spaces together with whatever crayons, markers and colored pencils we have on hand. The resulting shapes are Kandinsky-like fields of color which I cut out along their edges. Some look like the internal structures of cells, some like maps, sometimes like aerial photographs of agricultural fields. I can't get enough of making them or looking at them. They're hanging all over the house. We've made dozens.
There's been quite some beauty to be made out of the bits and scraps left from cutting out the shapes. Some of them carry the same colors as the main show, because we usually scribble a bit with the marker, crayon, or pencil to check the color before applying it. Other scraps contain marks from the main shape that went over the border of the edge, which I do intentionally because it makes it easier to create a flat, uniform field of color, especially with the crayon, all the way to the black border. (I can be fussy like that, it appears--it's interesting to find oneself fussy about a new thing, then negotiating with oneself over the terms.) Then there are the random flurries of pencil or marker that my art partner applies. So instead of throwing them out, I am turning them into collages, which I photograph, then manipulate the images.
This feels tremendously satisfying, particularly the part where I’m using the detritus from artless, automatic and purely functional moments for aesthetic purposes that emerge from the material itself, because in my life as a writer there’s little opportunity to do the same. Partly it’s because there’s no ready form for them, partly because the bulk of revising and editing exists as the smallest of lexical shavings. Yes, if I take out a large section of text, it gets saved in a separate file (I use Scrivener, so it goes into a file with “ex,” as in “excised,” appended to the title), but the single words here and there, the auxiliary verbs and affixes, they all get tossed aside, even though in aggregate—on the order of thousands of these things—the effect might be dramatic. No, I can't be bothered by saving them. Perhaps this is a shortcoming I should attempt to overcome.
Maybe if I were using a manual typewriter, as I used to do (that's a separate essay), I could cut out blocks of typewritten text and arrange those, but the immateriality of the modern writing life leads me to something else: aesthetic practice in another medium. I would love to be a writer in the same way I'm a cook or a gardener, not just waiting to see what pops out of the ground and taking it from there, but also arranging the disordered bits that were produced with no plan into something whose effects are deliberate--though temporary, because you can remake it, over and over. Bringing the margins into the center and giving them a job, making them core, and then reducing it again by locating its margins and raising them to importance, drawing them together into something they hadn't been. A sort of circular economy of experience.
That these drawings and the collages emerged from the pandemic seems fitting, too, because during the lockdowns many of the edge activities, the ones that were unplanned, the ones you'd normally speed by on your way to doing the planned activities, became themselves the center of the day, its beating heart of chocolate. For this I find myself nostalgic for the lockdown time, for its resurrections and revolutions, and I hang their colors on my heart.
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