Thinking in Ink

The other day, my partner and I were consolidating storage spaces, and I came across a few of my old ink drawings.

Holding these drawings in my hand, I was immediately flooded with memories and sensations from 20 years ago. And the key thing is: I was holding them. They were objects that smelled and took up space. I ran my fingers over the little marks and tears on the paper that betrayed the passage of years. They were present, yet showed signs of their inevitable disintegration. They were a validation of my being as a biological entity, proof that I’m not just a collection of tortured thoughts and feelings.

I pulled out some more drawings. These were from a graphic memoir I was working on seven years ago.

The splatters were from a 10-foot painting I was working on, and that is indeed a coffee stain on the left, one of the happier accidents in my creative life.

It had been a while since I’d drawn in ink, and paging through these, I could almost smell that odd metallic/sour/egg odor of India ink.

There’s no Command-Z with pen and ink. That forces me to think things through before making a mark, connecting with my body, making sure my hand is steady. With the gift (and prison) of “undo,” I often slip into laziness and unmindfulness, armed with the soporific safety net of being able to go back in time and disappear mistakes.

The spontaneity, the directness, and the stakes lead to less analytical thinking, yet more thoughtful and embodied awareness on my part. It reminds me of when I was an assistant art director at Scientific American in the late 1990s. I was given a slow computer. Even by ’90s standards, the refresh rate of the screen was laughable. But it forced me to think things through before making a decision about the layout I was working on. I grew fond of this machine, similar to how I felt about my old, beat-up Honda Civic. It might not have been pretty, but it worked, and I felt like I had a give-and-take relationship with it. The work became a meditative process.