I've started keeping a bag of the dust from the buildings I sketch
There's a house on 8th Cross in Malleswaram, the one with the green shutters and the sloping Mangalore tile roof, and they've put up the demolition board already. I sketched it on Sunday morning, sat on the footpath with my chai going cold next to me.
When I finished I did something I've apparently started doing without deciding to. I scraped some of the plaster dust off the plinth into a small plastic box and wrote the date on the lid with a gel pen. There are nine boxes in the shelf now, from nine different houses. One of them is from a house in Basavanagudi that's a parking lot today.
I don't know what I'm going to do with them. It's not a project, I'm not framing them or making pigment out of them like some proper artist would. It's just that the dust is the actual building, and my painting is only ever my idea of the building. The box is the more honest object.
My husband asked what the boxes were and I said I'd tell him later, which was three months ago. So I'm telling the internet instead.
Does anyone else do this or is it just me being strange about it
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the dust boxes are the part that got me, not the sketching. nine of them and one already sitting under a parking lot. that's a weirdly specific archive and i kind of love it.
ngl though, i can't tell if the box is a tribute or just a way of not having to feel the whole thing while you're sitting there. i have a shelf of half-finished panels from places that don't exist anymore and i've never once decided if they're memorials or avoidance. probably both, which is fine as long as you keep sketching.
Honestly, both. The scraping is a way of doing something with my hands while the caretaker is watching me and I don't have to say anything to him. That's avoidance, I know it. But the boxes are also the only bit of the house that's still going to be a house in ten years.
Half-finished panels from places that don't exist anymore is a harder shelf than mine, na? At least my dust is done being anything. Yours is still mid-sentence. Do you ever go back and finish one, or is finishing it the thing you can't do?