Recto Verso by Bartram Angela. Gittens Douglas. El-Bizri Nader. & Nader El-Bizri & Douglas Gittens

Author:Bartram, Angela.,Gittens, Douglas.,El-Bizri, Nader. & Nader El-Bizri & Douglas Gittens
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing Ltd.
Published: 2014-12-27T16:00:00+00:00

Like erotic love, sketches are active, often performative and of the instant. While they remain as tangible artifacts, these are merely the traces of an attempt to capture what Hélène Cixous describes as ‘the happening of the instant’, for [to paraphrase her], ‘what is a painter – [sketcher] – but a bird catcher of instants’.21 In her essay ‘The Last Painting or The Portrait Of God’ she elucidates on this through analogy with love:

But in life it is “only in the act of love – by the clear, starlike abstraction of what one feels [that] we capture the unknown quality of the instant, which is hard and crystalline and vibrant in the air, and life is that incalculable instant, greater than the event itself.”22

If the sketch with its insatiable gaze aims to catch Cixous’ ‘present absolute’,23 the sketchbook paradoxically represents them as history. Pérez-Gómez outlines three structural components of Eros as lack: the lover, the beloved, and the space-time that comes between them, (for the myths of Eros are generally of love deferred or obstructed, just as in this lovers’ tale).24 In the sketch analogy the lover is the artist, the beloved the architectural subject, and the sketchbook is space-time made manifest in the translation from observation of an instant to archival record. Like love, which is both a series of distinct events and a field of sensation, they collect, curate and solidify specific experiences into a whole greater than the sum of its parts.

Sketchbooks by their very form suggest permanence: bound multiple pages that are robustly covered, and often with useful details of end-pockets and bookmarks, they are intended as repositories, albeit informal active ones. Their scale and materiality – hand-sized, often covered with skin or leather (evocative of flesh and carnality?), and able to be held fast with elastic binding – makes them semi-precious, personal possessions to hold dear. Imbued with inherent material ‘worth’ as objects – books rather than mere paper – most sketchbooks are filled if not self-consciously, then at least with an implicit investment in self-reflection. Their structure compels a narrative, reading by convention from front to back, left to right, and for the most part the sketchbooks here are chronological journals, carefully dated or stamped. The occasional disruption to their chronology is revealing. Tell-tale torn or cut pages indicate not erasure of unsuccessful drawings, but drawings removed as gifts for the other, drawings too personal, too brazen for these otherwise public volumes. She often leaves the first pages blank, to be back filled with a ‘significant enough’ subject to introduce the collection – like a first kiss that is replayed again and again in lovers’ accounts of their meeting. His are more direct. He starts and finishes each book methodically but casually, though keeps the last pages for written material, so as not to dilute the pictorial flow of the book. His practice of dating each book, each page, not with hand written numerals but stamps or labelling tape from his portable kit, gives lie to any sense of the impromptu.

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