A Case for Blotter Art

There are moments in your past that shape our vision. Experiencing my childhood photo albums, I catch a glimpse of Anna during the early grades, a basic girl who, if she remained alive, won’t discover how even during grade 4, she was pointing the right way to freedom of expression. There exists a lesson here that comes in handy for parents and grandparents.

I have often wondered if Anna’s life might have taken a different turn had she lived her early grades in the sixties in the event the ballpoint pen, replacing the fountain pen, dispensed with the use of ink blotters at school. Children of the fifties, we learnt writing the tough way–with steel-nibbed pens which we drizzled with ink pots and which invariably turned the writing experience into a mud-bath. It took us months to master ale compromise: speed meant accidental globs and splotches; in case you wanted in order to save time, you would be far wiser to learn the tortoise.

But Anna wasn’t any turtle. Her mind moved faster than light; she was figuring a means to Bali once we remained stuck in the grade 3 reader; in the fourth grade, when individuals with older siblings counseled me agog over Elvis, she could find anything passionate than Japanese prints.

I recall Sister Mary Michael, the composition teacher in grade 4, who told us that writing was an action of God knowning that the writer would find his share of godliness in the holy trinity of pen, paper and blotter. From the three, the blotter was essentially the most indispensable. “Why?” we asked. “Good writing depends upon how you control some of it.” There were anything else that would have to be controlled too, according to Sister Mary Michael. Reading Anna’s essay on why she liked chocolates, Sister became very still and angular. She peered down in the child, her eyes blue and difficult above her spectacles. “Too many adjectives,” she snapped. “Too many words!”

When Anna looked over her, unmoved, Sister retrieved her pen. The nib drew a quick, little difference over Anna’s script; the blotter followed; there came more red lines, more words slashed away.

I watched Anna after she returned to her desk. She began writing, dabbing the blotter after her pen in true Sister Mary Michael fashion. For some time, it seemed that Anna had learnt her lesson. When I peered more closely over her shoulder, I noticed that it had been the blotter that has been absorbing her interest. She’d dribbled a location on the top right-hand corner in the sheet; she stuck the nib during the spot and watched the darkness grow; a few details with the nib and also the blotch had been a piece of chocolate, its center dissolving into a hole. Fascinated, I watched her work more blotches on the absorbent paper and more dabs before the entire blotter turned into some sort of chocolate swiss-cheese.

From her desk came more blotter sheets. As an alternative to holes, she made lines on this occasion, dark molasses lines dribbled and dripped almost spider fashion derived from one of corner to another; she paused just for a specified duration to thicken the middle stretch acquiring to break the flow before the entire sheet became criss-crossed with tubes of varying lengths and widths and also the blotter sat for my child desk like a chocolate web.

It absolutely was an early sort of Acid Art, so distinctive it made nice hair get up on end. But Sister Mary Michael couldn’t quite note that.
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