Books, sketchbook

Find little spaces inside of you and tease them open

After Lonely City I read Crudo, of course. More qualified people have written about it so I won’t go into that, but I enjoyed it immensely. It was funny, raw, and brilliant.

“When she was young, she’d sliced up her own flesh at the blink of an eye, she loved to get truly abject, but now she’d dried out…not appetising exactly, not desirable, but fodder for someone, a pigeon, at least. Was this getting older? Kathy was worried about ageing, she hadn’t realised youth wasn’t a permanent state, that she couldn’t always be cute and hopeless and forgivable.”

It takes place over a few days in her fortieth summer, and she’s about to get married. It’s not often that we see ourselves reflected so accurately in literature with all our fears and pimples and headaches, and Olivia Laing as Kathy Acker was spot on.

Take a look at the covers too: The UK paperback edition which I read, and here’s the US paperback one.

Title & this quotation from Crudo

Food, sketchbook

Samosa attack

When faced with a samosa, remember to get out of the way…

sketchbook

Sleep is such a luxury

sketchbook

Back again

I never left drawing, but I did find it difficult to share drawings after my pregnancy. Not sure where that came from. Was it a loss of self, a disconnect from the past, a need for solitude?

Perhaps I’ll never know for sure. But here’s the latest sketchbook:

People, sketchbook

More people

Like most people who draw, I look for opportunities to draw from life – mostly at airports, in the subway, wherever I’m waiting.

Here are some recent ones from last month.

peope4 peope3 peope2 peope1

Life, sketchbook

Tomorrow is our permanent address

While going through my archives, I found these pages from a 2004 journal. The brown boy and I had just gotten married, and I was resisting all the extended family’s combined pressure on me to start propagating the species.

In this angry book it seems that while I did not want to have a baby, I knew all about the details of bearing one. What a know-it-all I was.

2004-baby-1 2004-baby-2 2004-baby-3 2004-baby-4

Life, sketchbook

Getting where we’re going

201604-living 201604-living-2

[Sometimes in the living of every day

I often forget about the life of it

the intentionality, “the composing of the life”

that I once set out to do. The daily bustle,

that once emerged from me –

often swallows me up

until all I can do is hold on for dear life

to banal rituals

so that I don’t lose myself.]

Title: John Brehm

For pacificleo.

Life, sketchbook, Work

Some days

My relationship with Mondays have changed multiple times over the years –

Blue Monday (2014)

Conversations with the Anteater, part V (2009)

If you’re one of those people who suffer from Monday blues, here’s a hug from the anteater.

20160410-hug

Books, Life, sketchbook

Fragile the minutes

I wanted rest but what I got was work. And in between there were whispered wisdom from far and wide.

inthemoment

Linda Gregerson | James Doty

Also Visit, Life, sketchbook, travels

Drawing on holidays

It never ceases to surprise me how many firsts are still left in life – a new activity this year was a trip with friends who are artists in their own right. Believe me when I tell you it was most refreshing.

And here you can catch the brown boy in action.

destress

inktales

Life, in drawings

Tag Archives: sketchbook