Home > Writing and Speaking > A Case for Blotter Art

A Case for Blotter Art

There are moments within our past that shape our vision. Going through my childhood photo albums, I catch a glimpse of Anna in early grades, a quiet girl who, if she were alive, will not recognize how even in grade 4, she was pointing the right way to freedom of expression. There exists a lesson here links in handy for folks and grandparents.


I’ve often wondered if Anna’s life probably have taken some other turn had she lived her early grades from the sixties if the ballpoint pen, replacing the fountain pen, dispensed if you use ink blotters in college. Children of the fifties, we learnt writing the hard way–with steel-nibbed pens which we drizzled with ink pots and which invariably turned the writing experience in to a mud-bath. It took us months to understand the skill of compromise: speed meant accidental globs and splotches; in case you really wanted in order to save time, you would be far wiser to learn the tortoise.

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

Going Sister Mary Michael, the composition teacher in grade 4, who told us that writing was an action of God understanding that the writer would find his share of godliness from the holy trinity of pen, paper and blotter. In the three, the blotter was one of the most indispensable. “Why?” we asked. “Good writing is dependent upon the method that you control some of it.” There was clearly much else that would have to be controlled also, based on Sister Mary Michael. Reading Anna’s essay on why she liked chocolates, Sister became very still and angular. She peered down in the child, her eyes blue and hard above her spectacles. “Too many adjectives,” she snapped. “Too many words!”

When Anna viewed her, unmoved, Sister retrieved her pen. The nib drew a quick, little difference 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 time, it seemed as if Anna had learnt her lesson. When I peered more closely over her shoulder, I pointed out that it turned out the blotter that’s absorbing her interest. She’d dribbled a location on top right-hand corner of the sheet; she stuck the nib during the spot and watched the darkness grow; a few details using the nib as well as the blotch became a piece of chocolate, its center dissolving in to a hole. Fascinated, I watched her work more blotches about the absorbent paper and more dabs prior to the entire blotter turned into a sort of chocolate swiss-cheese.

Beyond her desk came more blotter sheets. As an alternative to holes, she made lines on this occasion, dark molasses lines dribbled and dripped almost spider fashion from one corner to another; she paused just of sufficient length to thicken the center stretch acquiring to break the flow prior to the entire sheet became criss-crossed with tubes of varying lengths and widths as well as the blotter sat to be with her desk as being a chocolate web.

It had been an earlier type of Blotter Art Company, so distinctive it made your hair ascend to end. But Sister Mary Michael could not quite see that.
More information about Blotter Art Company go to the best web site: look at this now

You may also like...

Leave a Reply