The highlight of my trip to Spain had to be the caves and the unwritten poem composed during my visit there. I had taken a year off to join my art college buddy to Europe. We both kept journals. I scribbled what I remembered of that spontaneous poem into my journal describing our adventures hitchhiking and my awakening as a young adult to the outside and inside world. I lived in a very Catholic home with a large family amongst my family’s families. My travels disturbed my behaviours and beliefs such that I was at odds with the reality I lived when I returned.
My poem of ten lines or so, attempted to distill the essence of my brief experience inside the buried cathedral, called Forever Is. When my mother came into my room one day for some reason, she asked me about my trip. I told her about the caves, and the poem, and the one I wrote down trying to remember the experience. She read my written poem aloud: it sounded cryptic to me and sexual to her. She asked what happened that prompted the poem and blundered with her questions. Hurt by her response and inarticulate with frustration, I pulled the journal back, and after she left, tore the poem from my journal into tiny pieces.
The experience of the buried cathedral stayed with me. When I began a course in lithography, I learned how to draw on a block of limestone, prepare it with inks, waxes and resins and using a huge, heavy press rolled out a few samples. The instructor spoke of layering, repeating the process and drawing directly. I poured ink, tilting the stone, played with shapes appearing organically and began a series reminiscent of the limestone caverns in Spain. The feeble grey tones and unsubtle line interventions kept me plugging on, until I had a stack of artist proofs vaguely reminiscent of the stalactites and stalagmites. These I kept on the bottom shelf of my bookcase in my furnace room/art studio at home. That December Halifax had rains which filled our basement with 16 inches of water, leaving my prints in a sodden mass of soft tissue surrounding gobs of ink.
The following winter, in the hiatus between graduation and seeking paid employment, I picked up pen and ink and began ‘doodling’. In a manner similar to the organic drawing instruction I received in my first year, where the nib does not leave the page, a continuous line is allowed to roam freely without intention to make thick or thin lines, twisting, curving or straight with an unknown destination. My parents watched the 20 x 15 inch doodle become something else.
My father wanted a landscape painting for the living room, something with color.
My Mother, hesitated, curious about the unfolding shapes, looked and didn’t say much.
For two long months I picked up the drawing in the evenings, fascinated myself, as lines began to reveal the interior landscape of the Spanish caves.
I finished the pair of drawings, had them museum mounted and framed to give to my parents.
They hang now in my stairwell, reframed and in a place where I see them every time I use the stairs.
I often pause, reminded of the caves, my interior world, and those moments that are Forever Is.