Thinking in Colour
a meeting of words and image on the blank page
To verse, to turn, to bend, to plough, a furrow, a row, to turn around, toward, to traverse
—From Verso 4 Dionne Brand
After writing about glimmers a few weeks ago I was trying to think what my tiny mood changing triggers might be. The little plays put on by the forest floor, of course, but and also beyond collecting acorn caps and dogwood berries in the shifting August yellow green of the ravines, there’s my sketchbook. I’ve been keeping a sketchbook since I was 18 and stuck in a hospital bed for a month with a tube in my nose and a central line IV drip sewn into my neck recovering from a theatre accident. I remember listening to music and filling the pages. I remember the blank page as the access to the not-yet-in-the-world parts of me— the feeling of turning noise into something alive though still not yet quite clear. And over the years the sketchbook was an escape, an adventure, a set of possibilities, a testing ground and, because it flips, a design space for words and pictures to meet. Poems, recipes, letterforms, memories, the beginnings of ideas the beginning of stories. There is always another page to turn. And you have to wait for the ink to dry before turning the page and resetting the frame. And that threaded ravine in the middle where the two sides meet. And what it is to just put words like a title and let the verso be blank. It’s a kind of book. Waterproof on the outside soft Canadian paper inside bound with thread, all those drawings held tightly, each one a kind of chapter together on a shelf a year, and all the shelves together, a life.
There have been times when I needed the sketchbook like medicine, more than a glimmer, a kind of lifeline. I remember holding my black sketchbook like an anchor in a watery lonely winter in the Pacific North East a Japanese cargo van in a parking lot on a hill overlooking the city just the tips of Mount Rainer hovering triangles above the heavy grey clouds my dog on the bed I built in the back about to leave for the Yukon and trying to imagine world of dusty goldpanners smoking pipes searching the rivers for a glint of hope. Some of those pages became a book called Festus most of them are tucked away into a black book with a date on the last page in a library of black books. Each page true to its moment, but now mostly old maps to roads mostly washed out long ago.
Last week I sat on the porch with a view down the street, a few beakers of natural colour beside me, some black ink, a dip pen, a scruffy squirrel hair brush, the opened-minded page, sometimes music, more often just quiet. Now since becoming an inkmaker, I find my sketchbook pages taking a form that feels a little less erratic a little more sure. A series of captioned inkblot tests. Words that belong to and hold and reshape the inkstains pulling them as the ink is pulled into the centre, sometimes passing though the page to print the next page with a hail of little dots.
And so what follows is a little gallery of what’s been mind thats made it out onto the page.
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