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"He had big hands, strong hands. Yet hands that were capable of great delicacy. You only had to see him hold a pen. And for me so much stems from this and why rather than a photograph Mum and I decided to place a signature on the cover of the service sheet.
You see it says so much: the sense of line, restraint and yet expression. It had been instilled in art school - a sense of proportion : of a letter, of a man, of a building. And it was something he was keen to pass on to me - the importance of handwriting, the sense of a page, when less was always more ... ".
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It feels very strange to write this post - and I have been wondering whether it was even appropriate. From the start there have been things off limits on the Blog - work-related matters, family stuff.
Yet if I'm honest, my father is one reason why I do what I do and so it's only fitting to mark his passing.
The past three weeks have been very strange. As were the months leading up to it - a sense that something was going to happen increasingly sooner rather than later. It's evident in the Blog: fewer posts, scattered attention, hardly anything written or made for months.
During the week leading up to the funeral I knew I wanted to make something using one of my father's pictures and - of all things - a poem he must have scribbled a matter of months ago. It would be our first collaboration. Perhaps there'll be more.
As I was making the funeral service booklet I kept wondering what it all amounted to: drawing, writing, book making ... - there are certain moods when everything you touch seems thin and flimsy. Why bother?And so it was heart-warming to find an e-mail from Jill Magi in my Inbox the very moment I printed off the last copy of the funeral service. Jill had just opened a little book I'd sent a year ago (the library of last resort) and wanted to tell me how much she'd enjoyed leafing through the pages: "Art, teaching me to live. Life, teaching me the art borne of sheer trembling—compassion." She couldn't have known and yet the timing couldn't have been better.
So I'll go on making things no matter how thin and flimsy. You never know who might be reading and how what you've made gives a shape to live by.
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3 comments:
Lovely. Your dad must have been a grand man. Wish he was still here for you.
Feeling sorry about you and wish that God provide you the strength to handle your self.
May God Keep him in peace .... forever.
No matter how thin and flimsy.
Sometimes a single phrase or a word, the whorl of a letter, a word grain, an image. A single moment in language, a single moment, the apprehension of something ‘true.’ Real in a rhizomatic way. Like suddenly seeing a single molecule of something. A thing no matter how thin and flimsy. Humans made out of these thin and flimsy things. Human thought.
When something ‘speaks’ to us, it is a fragment. A quick flash of something. A single leaf in a forest of otherwhere. Or everyhere. A consolation. An encouragement. A confirmation.
Imagination, memory, experience, compassion. The human. Rhizomes.
I'm sorry for your loss. Am glad for your work.
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