The house on 4th Cross came down on Tuesday and I have 11 sketches of it
I got a message from a friend on Tuesday morning, a photo actually. The old house on 4th Cross, the one with the red oxide floor and the wooden balcony with the turned railing posts. Gone. Just the compound wall and a pile of rubble and two men sitting on it having tea.
I have eleven sketches of that house. Eleven. From different angles, different mornings, different light. And I still felt like I hadn't really looked at it. That's the thing that gets me. I could draw a building a hundred times and still not be sure I actually saw it, and then one day it's a pile and the sketches are all I have and some of them are wrong. The proportions off, the balcony too high, the shadow in the wrong place.
When I was an architect I used to draw buildings so they could be built. Now I draw them so they can be remembered and honestly I'm not sure I'm any better at it. Different job, same feeling of missing something.
Not looking for advice on this one. Just wanted to say it out loud somewhere. Tuesday was a bad day.
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The eleven sketches thing is real but I'd push back a little on the idea that you never saw it. Drawing something repeatedly is a kind of seeing that memory alone doesn't give you. You were looking at it more carefully than the people walking past it every day, you just don't get the comfortable feeling of having captured it, because the drawing never matches what was in front of you. I work in mosaic and it's the same, I spend weeks on a facade and still feel like I missed it, and then I look at the work a year later and all the looking is in there whether I felt it or not.
What gets me more is the red oxide floor. That floor was probably older than most of the people who'll move into whatever goes up there. No sketch of it, no photo of it either from the sound of it, just you remembering it was red. That's the part that goes.
The two men with the tea is the part I'd keep too. That's the thing that doesn't make it into the drawing when you try to make it about the house.
Half-agree on the rest though. Drawing it eleven times doesn't mean you saw it, it means you kept going back. Those aren't the same thing. Some of my best-looking pieces are of places I never actually understood, I just found a composition and repeated it until it looked deliberate.
Weeks on a facade though. I don't have that in me.
Ha, "found a composition and repeated it until it looked deliberate." That's uncomfortably accurate and I'm going to be thinking about it all week.
But I'll hold my ground on one bit: going back eleven times is its own kind of looking, even if I never quite arrived. I know I hadn't understood the house. I don't think I'd have kept going back if some part of me wasn't still trying to. The repetition came from something, na? Even if what it produced was just... habit with good light.
Also the tea. Yes. I've drawn that house eleven times and the only thing in it that was actually alive was two men and a steel glass. Which tells you what I was looking at, honestly.
A mosaicist, that explains the patience. Weeks on one facade, I can't imagine. And you're right about the year-later thing, I've noticed it too, I look at a sketch from 2019 and suddenly I remember the exact smell of that street and not the drawing. So the looking did go in. It just doesn't feel like it at the time.
But what were you going to say gets you more? You stopped mid-sentence on me.