Beautiful Books: I picked up a Sketchbook, The Origins of Green, by Zachari Logan

I picked up a Sketchbook: The Origins of Green
by Zachari Logan

I picked up a sketchbook in April of 2019 while I was in Venice working towards a presentation of my work as a collateral project of that year’s biennale. It is a very basic sketchbook, clasped by staples on rendered recycled paper – not archival or particularly hearty, but it felt consequential. I made a few aesthetic decisions then and there: it would be all drawings in plein air, diaristic, in-the-moment recordings of places, moments in time – and they would all be made in shades of green pen, ink and pencil. A nod to the cover’s design and perhaps an acknowledgement of my favourite colour. I did not initially have the intention that this little book would be attached to a collection of poems and essays. But it struck me odd, that although my visual practice is anchored by the discipline of drawing, I don’t have a sketchbook practice in any conventional sense – as in, I do not process my ideas for a drawing, painting or sculpture by first sketching them – I just make them. So I thought it would be an interesting idea to carry a sketchbook and see what it amounted to. Somewhere along the way, contemplating the places life had taken me through five years of travel and domestic life, a pandemic and strange everchanging political ecologies, it became apparent that what I was writing was interwoven or fused to the images populating the little green sketchbook I was drawing in.

The choice to title the book Green was more than just a nod to a favourite colour, it was also related to my love of the sketchbook itself; this small, seemingly inconsequential object, familiar only to me and simple in its design. These are all aspects that compelled me to echo its exterior design for the cover and back of the collection, while also having it reproduced in its entirety within the book’s centre. The printed text for the entire book is a beautiful forest green. Green as conceptual anchor, as association, as interrelation, as queerness. All colours we perceive are of the world, but green’s association with nature and earth is inviolable. Chlorophyll, the substance that makes plants green by our perception of it is the root of this. Plant life is the most populous life form on the planet, a lifeform literally embedded in the earth and thus in our associations with it. Examining aspects of the colour green idiosyncratically, and in phenomenological terms reflects a deep curiosity and enchantment I have with the world and my body within it. In my preface I recall a memory of an unforgettable sky turning deep green due to a tornado forming over Saskatoon and in poems like “The Beanstalk and I Live With All My Greens,” (the poems that open and close the collection) I excavate green similarly.

I give green a political lens through the colour’s association with the ecological movement in the poems “Silent Spring (For Rachel Carson),” “Tether”, “Class War” and “Monarch Butterflies Are Almost Extinct.” and there are also personal musings on colour more broadly in the poems “The Difficulty of Yellow and Burgundy 1-17.” There are also a few reddish juxtapositions (or following the colour wheel’s logic, you’d say opposites – as red is the opposite of green in basic colour theory). This colour play echoes between the drawings and poems throughout, beginning with the book’s cover – its title, Green, scrolled in a rosy red, repeated in the book’s centre, a consequence of the sketchbook’s own design. Within the collection of studies, there are two of saints being ‘flayed’ and another, a study of an El greco painting of St. Francis with stigmata wounds – and there is also a study of Franz von Stuck’s Lucifer, all rendered in greens rather than the reds and flesh tones of human violence we would typically associate. In my poem “Notes on Caravaggio” there is particular attention paid to his various depictions of flowing blood, and a barked bloody knuckle resembles the vulnerable feeling of new love and longing in the poem “Lake Winnipeg.”

Many of the poems parallel the “in the moment” nature of carrying a sketchbook and observing the world as it unfolds while one is in it, as in, the moment. For me that can be the result of walking, being in parks at home or abroad, in front of artworks in museums, on a beach sunbathing, or in my studio working. I call this a form of gentle examination that results in an attention to detail or recollection that gives a viewer or reader an experience of sometimes what goes unnoticed and undervalued. This is often due to our sped-up existence in a world continually monitored by recording devices that appear to do the work for us, namely “smart phones” that leave us with a detached understanding of our surroundings. One example is an observation of the general public in museums stopping for mere seconds in front of a painting or sculpture only to take a photo and move onto the next work. These objects were made for a slower intake by our brains – but we desire the keepsake of the second hand to recall later – only, what is it we are recalling? Not the artwork itself, just a picture of it – a simulacra.

When I am in front of a painting, looking at it, then, sketching it, I’m getting beneath it or at least getting nearer to its objectness. Similarly, when I am drawing a streetcorner with all its commotion and flow, I am piercing the space I’m inhabiting with a form of understanding that gets past a moment’s glance or a “pic” on my phone. Like a diaristic poem can elucidate a given experience, the sketches they accompany here share a less voyeuristic experience of my own life. While I am drawing what is all around me, my perception of place and my body within it is both challenged and understood a little better by me. Ultimately, I wish to share this process of simple enchantment, this fullness or integration in my drawings – as I do in my written work.