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Show 35 had copied a couple of sketches into it from an old newsprint pad that dated from Miss Cekada's class. The results hadn't pleased him, but you didn't tear pages out of a clothbound sketchbook, and he was left with the sense that he had documented two modes of perception, one of them synthetic. The thready incompleteness of the original sketches--they were of Connie Gish, bopping self-consciously on one of the art-room tables to a Bill Haley record Miss Cekada had brought-gained nothing from being reduced to carefully-considered ink lines, and though the original sketches, he had to admit, were not very presentable, their ungainliness was at least made ambiguous by the haze of alternate rapid lines, terminating in fishhooks, that did not commit themselves. The copies, on the other hand, hardened the inaccuracies without preserving the illusion of tentativeness. Making the first mark on a clean white page with his fountain pen had been hard--it was like hearing his own voice in an empty room-and had kept him, he suspected, from loosening up in time to bring any flexibility to his lines. There was no reason, he suspected, that a drawing could not itself become an original from which a drawing was made--it merely meant approaching it as a given, the way you would approach a dancing figure or a staggered row of bottles--but he also suspected that this was a level of sophistication that he was not ready for. He was sorry to have put such a mistake on record in his clothbound sketchbook, but fortunately he had selected two pages out of the middle of the book and had not dated them, so that in time, as the book filled up, the copies would be assimilated into a thicker context and look like casual lapses or even experiments. Nevertheless, he had waited until the next day before selecting another page, also near the center of the book but at some distance from the copies, to put what he had learned to the test. He had picked an apparently arbitrary subject- |
