Dear Sarah - 006

Sheep in Shinjuku, Conversations with Rocks

(Just joining us? These letters chronicle our full year of daily drawings and accompanying correspondence/conversation. Learn more about Sarah Harvey here. More info about me can be found here.)

Dear Sarah - January 6, 2025

OMG I LOVE those drawings by you and Kianna! I laughed aloud reading your description of the solitary game of checkers… It would be fun to draw Snowy based on your drawing of Snowy… a bit like a visual game of telegram.

I have tried daily journalling at various points in my life, but never last longer than a few months. When I travel, the schedule is often so insane that I don’t allow time to sit, reflect, write, or draw at the end of the day (this trip, so far, is proving to be a bit better pacing-wise). These emails back and forth are fun! Effortless - I can’t wait to see what message and drawing arrives in my in-box each day…

Today has been quiet so far - Fabio and I took a stroll down a big shopping street in search of a grocery store. We found one and bought a few noodle variations for lunch… Just outside the store was a woman performing - a ventriloquist with an opera-singing sheep dressed in an outfit that was a cross between a Bavarian-style dirndl and a kimono.

Ok… I couldn’t resist.. here’s my Snowy inspired by your Snowy inspired by Kianna’s Snowy… Agree that our versions are lacking something of the wild spontaneity of the original artist.

Dear Nikki - January 6, 2025

I'm attaching a drawing and photo of a paragraph from a book I just finished: Small Things Like These by Irish writer, Claire Keegan. It's a very short book--you can read it in a couple of hours or less --but it is a superb example of what can be done when you choose words precisely and employ them with skill. The story is heartbreaking, atmospheric, tender, angry, intelligent, and bold. All the things I want in a novel. Not a word is wasted. Keegan is a marvel.

So can the principle of brevity be applied to drawing as well? I think so, but I don't yet have a big enough drawing vocabulary to know what to leave out. Today I drew a few small things. I wanted to revisit the little rocks from my windowsill drawing and somehow I got it into my head that I should start a conversation between them. There's an interloper, which was hard to draw! All angles and edges. It's fascinating how the mind wants to create a story where there isn't one. I could write a novel about what's on my windowsill. Or maybe I'll just give my windowsill to one of the characters in our thriller.

Do you always work from photographs for your drawings? Do you prefer the iPad to pencils and pens? I'm taking pictures of things that I want to draw, but I feel as if that's cheating, somehow. That working from "life" is the "correct" way. I don't have an iPad, but I'm interested in the process. Do you feel that you lose immediacy when you go from photograph to iPad or is it not a factor?

I discovered that Kianna has a trove of watercolour pencils. I'd like to experiment with colour sometime. Maybe she'll lend me some!