Copying Gorey

The complete opposite of working with charcoal, or at least the way I work with charcoal, is to do cross-hatching with pen and ink. Somewhere along the way I decided I needed to work small and compact and easily manageable and mess free and clean and black and white so I thought I must at least try pen and ink. I decided not to use a dip pen yet and brought out my nice Lamy fountain pen with its fine nib. I decided to copy technique from BW drawings I had collected on Pinterest in order to teach myself, so first I drew this skull which I was rather pleased with. Naturally I instagrammed it.

Then this
I decided that wasn’t so bad either so I got more ambitious. I must learn technique from the best I thought so I brought out a book by Edward Gorey and decided I was going to copy technique from there. After flipping through the pages and feeling rather taken aback by the complexities of what I saw, I settled on what looked like the easiest drawing.

Somewhere along the way, when you copy drawing and technique from great masters, a cloud of humility descends on you and envelops you; not just because they draw as well as they do but because while you are following their lines in an attempt to recreate their image you come into a realization of how they solved a problem in the best possible manner while you laboured through it with gritted teeth. While copying Gorey, it begins to occur to you why this man's work is so much more superior to the rest. You also realize that 98% of all illustrators are bull-shitters who bluff their way through and it is only a miniscule 2% who not only really know how to draw but also know the art of illustrating well. These 2% are almost always grouchy bearded men who have a bottle of wine welded onto one hand while they draw ceaselessly with the other. Thirty, forty drawings a day I am told. They all swear. They are all atheists. Here, one of those bearded blokes has instagrammed Ronald Searle’s collection of pen nibs. After seeing this I want to bury my head in my hands that I attempted to copy Gorey using a Lamy. 

But still in the spirit of being positive and that kind of thing, I have promised myself that I will do at least one cross-hatched image a day so that in about a decade from now I can draw extra small size. Okayfine, now where did I keep that stick of charcoal?

What is it Like?

Being a new immigrant feels like a fish being compelled to ride a bicycle, in other words, you have to completely discard your identity and assume a new one and that is something which feels grotesque and unnatural, much like what the illustration portrays. My friends will vouch that throughout my entire stay in Canada the expression on my face was exactly like that of the fish on the bicycle. 

No country can give you everything that you want. If in one country you finally had the hard won life you created for yourself, centered on what you value most, another country might have eventually given me the quiet and dignity that I desired. However in my case, it seemed to be at the expense of all that I had striven for till now. ‘What do I value more?’ was the question that I asked myself frequently in the midst of my immigrant dilemma. The longer I stayed on searching for something which I began to suspect did not exist, the further away I kept moving from the path that led to all that I held close to my heart. The consequence was great unhappiness and an acute loss of confidence. Whichever part of the world you live in, the truth is what an illustrator who has also been through it all once told me – “The only happy place is inside our heads, when we are drawing and being kind...”

Strange Beliefs