36mountains, or Falling in Love with a Sketch

I’m starting this blog with the story of a mistake.

It was last summer and I was working on a project for 36mountains exhibition (here all the information about it). I had been asked to fill a concertina notebook with black and white drawings about mountains – free interpretation, free media. I took some days for sketching and deciding what I would be drawing. Then I started.

My sketches looked like this.

 

 

I had overlapped different layers of paper – I didn’t mention it had to be tracing paper, like the pages of the notebook – and I used paper scotch tape to be able to move every part as I pleased. The goal was to recreate the flexibility of Photoshop, a software that I had been working a lot with those days, while dealing with the fact that the notebook had to be “the” original: no prints were allowed on it and, most of all, no mistakes.

I designed my sketches with extreme care, calculating the exact position of each element: nothing had to change in the final work, it would have been just a matter of relaxing and copying. Then something happened.

Has it ever occurred to you that, no matter how much energy and precision you put in the final work, the sketch always looks better? My teacher at the illustration school used to call it “falling in love with the sketch”. It’s a kind of love, I think. It’s probably the lack of pressure, the fact that the sketch is yours and potentially nobody can see it; or it’s the feeling you have when you’re sketching. However, the sketch is special, it has a magnetic roughness and, unfortunately, is irreplaceable.

And here comes my mistake. I convinced myself that I could actually reproduce my sketch. The secret, I thought, is in the paper cuts: it’s this way of mixing drawing and collage that makes the sketch so powerful. I bought a very expensive spray glue and, proud of my discovery, I started drawing and then pasting paper cuts as in the sketch. The result was, of course, terrible: it had nothing of the plainness of the sketch, it was just a bad collage.

I hurried up to remove all the paper cuts but the glue was still there. It took me three days to dry it under August’s sun. The pages were still sticky though. I closed the notebook and put it in an envelope, hoping my addressee would be able to open it. Luckily she did.

Here are a couple of pictures of the exhibition (in the second one you can see people actually looking at my notebook, a photo that honestly made me feel relieved).

 

 

The notebook looked like this.

 

 

Needless to say: if you’re in Rome and you need spray glue hit the “contact” button and I’ll reach back.