There are moments within our past that shape our vision. Experiencing my childhood photo albums, I catch a look at Anna in the early grades, an abandoned girl who, if she remained alive, doesn’t recognize how even in grade 4, she was pointing how you can freedom of expression. There’s a lesson here links in handy for folks and grandparents.
We’ve often wondered if Anna’s life may have taken an alternative turn had she lived her early grades inside the sixties once the ballpoint pen, replacing the fountain pen, dispensed if you use ink blotters in school. Kids of the fifties, we learnt writing the difficult way–with steel-nibbed pens which we drizzled with ink pots and which invariably turned the writing experience right into a mud-bath. It took us months to find out the art of compromise: speed meant accidental globs and splotches; should you wanted in order to save time, you would be far wiser to experience the tortoise.
But Anna was no turtle. Her mind moved faster than light; she was figuring a method to Bali when we remained stuck inside the grade 3 reader; inside the fourth grade, when people with older siblings were all agog over Elvis, she may 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 understanding that the writer would find his share of godliness inside the holy trinity of pen, paper and blotter. Of the three, the blotter was the most indispensable. “Why?” we asked. “Good writing is dependent upon the way you control the ink.” There were anything more that needed 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 at 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 fast, 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 while, it seemed like Anna had learnt her lesson. But when I peered more closely over her shoulder, I noticed that it turned out the blotter that has been absorbing her interest. She had dribbled an area on top right-hand corner with the sheet; she stuck the nib down the middle of lots of and watched the darkness grow; several details using the nib as well as the blotch has been a little bit of chocolate, its center dissolving right into a hole. Fascinated, I watched her work more blotches around the absorbent paper plus much more dabs before the entire blotter changed into a sort of chocolate swiss-cheese.
Out of her desk came more blotter sheets. Instead of holes, she made lines on this occasion, dark molasses lines dribbled and dripped almost spider fashion in one corner to a higher; she paused just for a specified duration to thicken the guts stretch without breaking the flow before the entire sheet became criss-crossed with tubes of varying lengths and widths as well as the blotter sat for my child desk like a chocolate web.
It was a young version of Acid Art, so distinctive it made your hair ascend to end. But Sister Mary Michael could not quite see that.
More information about Acid Art go to our new site: visit here