Paper
I used to draw every day. Random elaborate doodles, in full magic marker colour.
Sometimes I’d cut pictures out of magazines, glue them on a sheet of A3, and then draw things around them.
I used mostly felt markers, but occasionally spray paint, oil paints and acrylics.
All this required a steady supply of paper. Being a teenager with no income, I couldn’t afford art paper or pads of cartridge paper very often.
However, my dad supplied the house with reams of free paper.
I soon took this for granted but, looking back, this was a real blessing.
It seemed the building he worked in had an endless supply of scrap paper. And it was high quality art paper too. Waste from a printer or art studio? I never thought to ask.
But in those pre-computer days, with no internet, and TV only had two channels and was only on in the evening for a few hours, we had to make our own entertainment.
If I wanted to make a paper sign, I had to hand draw each letter. There was no option to type it on a computer and print it out with perfect fonts and endless typefaces.
Life was slower back then, and I think we were better off because things took time.
When my friends and I had a game of cricket in the summer, I brought along my dad’s black and white Polaroid camera. I took some photos of the game and of some girls who showed up near the end – ‘the crowd’.
After the game, we walked home hot and slightly sunburnt, and I sat in our front room and made a little book about the game.
I created some pages with scissors and a ruler. I pasted the photos onto the pages and wrote a short handwritten caption for each one.
I designed a full colour front cover, carefully drawing a particular typeface I’d seen on a cereal box.
I stapled it all together and showed it to my friends the next day.
I was the artistic one of the group I guess. I kept that little book of memories of one summer afternoon for years, but sadly I didn’t value it, and it got lost somewhere down the line.
Some years back, I bought a couple of art pads and a set of markers. I did some drawings. But I never really got back into it.
The digital age has spoiled my creativity in a way. Yes, it’s made new expressions possible but it’s all trapped in the clean and crisp digital framework of the medium.
Sometimes I want to colour outside the lines on purpose.
Sometimes I want to badly hand-draw a typeface.
Sometimes I’d like the limitations of an old Polaroid camera.
But I wonder if I just secretly miss my dad, coming home with bags of randomly sized paper.
There’s something about touching the past that brings healing.
It’s the analogue, hand-drawn, glued on, stapled, cut to size with scissors nature of it all.
I guess the blank screen is the new ‘clean sheet’ of paper.
But something is drawing me back… no pun intended.
Sometimes I feel a pull, calling for my attention. Like the tug of a kite on a string, on a windy day. In those times when I feel the pull, I find it’s usually a call to explore something.
Perhaps the call of our creativity is drowned out rather than enabled by modern life.
Thinking back, I don’t remember my dad being artistic. But he certainly enabled the rest of us to be, with his seemingly endless supplies of paper.
Thanks Dad.
don egan 