A Case for Blotter Art

There are moments in your past that shape our vision. Under-going my childhood photo albums, I catch a glimpse of Anna noisy . grades, a basic girl who, if she were still alive, does not understand how during grade 4, she was pointing how you can freedom of expression. There’s a lesson here which comes in handy for fogeys and grandparents.

We have often wondered if Anna’s life might have taken some other turn had she lived her early grades inside the sixties when the ballpoint pen, replacing the fountain pen, dispensed with the use of ink blotters in school. Kids 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 in a mud-bath. It took us months to understand the art of compromise: speed meant accidental globs and splotches; if you really wanted in order to save time, you’d be far wiser to learn the tortoise.

But Anna wasn’t any turtle. Her mind moved faster than light; she was figuring ways to Bali once we were still stuck inside the grade 3 reader; inside the fourth grade, when individuals with older siblings counseled me agog over Elvis, she might find no more passionate than Japanese prints.

Going 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 inside the holy trinity of pen, paper and blotter. Of the three, the blotter was probably the most indispensable. “Why?” we asked. “Good writing depends on the method that you control some of it.” There is anything more that must 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 at the child, her eyes blue and difficult above her spectacles. “Too many adjectives,” she snapped. “Too many words!”

When Anna viewed 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 quite a while, it seemed as though Anna had learnt her lesson. But when I peered more closely over her shoulder, I noticed that it was the blotter which was absorbing her interest. She had dribbled a location on top right-hand corner from the sheet; she stuck the nib down the middle of the location and watched the darkness grow; a few details together with the nib and also the blotch was a piece of chocolate, its center dissolving in a hole. Fascinated, I watched her work more blotches on the absorbent paper and more dabs before entire blotter converted into a kind of chocolate swiss-cheese.

Away from her desk came more blotter sheets. Instead of holes, she made lines this time, dark molasses lines dribbled and dripped almost spider fashion from corner to the next; she paused just for a specified duration to thicken the center stretch having to break the flow before entire sheet became criss-crossed with tubes of varying lengths and widths and also the blotter sat for my child desk as being a chocolate web.

It had been an early on type of Acid Art, so distinctive it made flowing hair climb onto end. But Sister Mary Michael cannot quite note that.
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