Memories of Japan

My friend Nuria made this for me when we were both living and working in Japan.

Kawaii desu ne?

And nightmares...

These are some details from some of the sketches in my dream diary. All kinds of nightmarish fears are in it – of riots, destruction, powerlessness, hopelessness, homelessness, harm, prejudice, judgement...

But I’ve also included two images of wonder and delight – a shoal of fish swimming near me and a flock of chickens freely wandering through the countryside with me at night.

Doodles

And a few sketches. Most of these were doodled in the margins of my high school maths, biology and Afrikaans notes, and a few I did in primary school.

Good friends

I’m a hoarder of words, especially handwritten words on notes, letters, cards and postcards, and I recently found this in a box of old papers. It’s almost twenty years old..!

It’s good to know that my friends thought of me when I missed a day of school... And of course I couldn’t wait to get back..!

Sketching taxis

This is another sketch I did just for me. We’d regularly go out and do location drawing around Grahamstown in first year, and I was sitting sketching the taxis. A man carrying a bottle of beer came and sat down beside me. He said he could take me to the township – that I needn’t be scared as a lot of wit vroumense (white women) like me went there. I laughed it off and kept drawing, and he finally lurched off to ask one of my classmates. The township was only on the other side of town, but it could have been another country to me and I only went there once – to an exhibition during the National Arts Festival.

I did that one from memory and these are the charcoal sketches I was doing that day.