An instance for Blotter Art

You will find moments inside our past that shape our vision. Dealing with my childhood photo albums, I catch a look at Anna in early grades, a nice girl who, if she were alive, doesn’t understand how during grade 4, she was pointing the best way to freedom of expression. There’s a lesson here which comes in handy for fogeys and grandparents.

We have often wondered if Anna’s life may have taken a different turn had she lived her early grades in the sixties once the ballpoint pen, replacing the fountain pen, dispensed by using ink blotters in college. Kids of the fifties, we learnt writing hard way–with steel-nibbed pens which we dipped in ink pots and which invariably turned the writing experience into a mud-bath. It took us months to find out the art of compromise: speed meant accidental globs and splotches; if you really wanted to save lots of time, you’d be far wiser to play the tortoise.

But Anna had not been turtle. Her mind moved faster than light; she was figuring a method to Bali whenever we were stuck in the grade 3 reader; in the fourth grade, when folks with older siblings counseled me agog over Elvis, she can find nothing at all passionate than Japanese prints.

Going Sister Mary Michael, the composition teacher in grade 4, who told us that writing was an act of God and that the real writer would find his share of godliness in the holy trinity of pen, paper and blotter. From the three, the blotter was one of the most indispensable. “Why?” we asked. “Good writing depends upon the method that you control the ink.” There was anything more that must be controlled also, as outlined by Sister Mary Michael. Reading Anna’s essay on why she liked chocolates, Sister became very still and angular. She peered down with the child, her eyes blue and hard above her spectacles. “Too many adjectives,” she snapped. “Too many words!”

When Anna looked at her, unmoved, Sister retrieved her pen. The nib drew an easy, thin line 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 a while, it seemed that Anna had learnt her lesson. However when I peered more closely over her shoulder, I remarked that it turned out the blotter that was absorbing her interest. She had dribbled a place on top right-hand corner of the sheet; she stuck the nib in the center of the area and watched the darkness grow; several details using the nib and also the blotch has been a little bit of chocolate, its center dissolving into a hole. Fascinated, I watched her work more blotches about the absorbent paper plus much more dabs prior to the entire blotter changed into a type of chocolate swiss-cheese.

From her desk came more blotter sheets. As an alternative to holes, she made lines this time around, dark molasses lines dribbled and dripped almost spider fashion from corner to a higher; she paused just for a specified duration to thicken the very center stretch without having to break the flow prior to the entire sheet became criss-crossed with tubes of varying lengths and widths and also the blotter sat on her behalf desk just like a chocolate web.

It was an earlier sort of Blotter Art, so distinctive it made your hair stand on end. But Sister Mary Michael could not quite observe that.
For more details about Blotter Art just go to the best web site: look at here