ESSAYS

05/ The Drawings Piling Up to the Level of the Height - Mr. S

The Drawings Piling Up to the Level of the Height.

One Saturday in October, 1982… Mr. S was relaxed on the navy-blue sofa on the 4th floor of N institute of arts. It was just after the feedback meeting that lasted over three hours. Research students were in a hurry to catch a train- Tokaido Line which only comes once in half an hour or even longer for Gotenba Line which if you missed the one between 8 and 9pm you have to wait till after 10pm.

17-year-old male student with messy hair came to the room saying

‘Sir, Could you have a look at my drawings?’

By the look of his B3 carton which seemed to hold a large stack of paper not just 1 or 2. Mr. S stood up and brought him to a different room downstairs. There were motifs for oil painting, and the floor was glistened by drying oils.

As Mr. S opened the carton and looked at few of the drawings, and he said,

‘What do you think a drawing is?’

The student who was standing on the right side of him could not give an answer to that question. He could see the dark beard on Mr. S’s right cheek. Mr. S said again as looking at the drawings

‘Drawing is to know.’

Before even finishing to look at all of them, he told him clearly again

‘You should do this till it reaches the level of your height. It doesn’t matter whether if they are good or bad, you will see something.’

The student made his mind on what he was told. Coming back home around 9pm he quickly had his dinner and had a bath…he shut himself in his room in front of the carton. His motifs were what’s there in his house as glasses, a ball, vegetables and meat…anyway, he drew anything he could find. It would be lucky if he could finish one B3 sized drawing before midnight. He abandoned school works since he decided to aim for an art university. During his school trip that lasted 5days, he brought his sketchbook with him and made a drawing of a waste basket in the hotel.

Autumn has passed so as the winter, and now the spring has come. By this time, he had many more drawings. He brought them to Mr. S. The thickness of the pile has reached the level of his ankle by then… but the challenge was to end here. This was because he could not bring his best to the drawings or oil painting that he was doing form 5 till 8pm at the institute. He had a tendency that if one thing starts to go wrong, he could not think about anything else other than that… He could not bring his B3 drawings anymore and Mr. S did not say anything about it… After decades without remembering about this, he in other word I unexpectedly remembered about this recently and I get caught up in my thoughts. If drawing is ‘knowing’, what I am doing now must also be ‘drawing’ in a broad sense… if this is true…if I remove the frames of the canvas and from other panels to make them flat…and if I pile up all the ‘drawings’ from when I was a senior high school student, would they reach the level of my height now?...if so, am I now able to ‘see’ that something?...or may be I am still drawing my way up to the level of my height.

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