A Warehouse of Memory by Roma Tearne
I have a vague recollection of my first sketchbook. I think it consisted of a collection of blank paper torn from my mother’s diary. I remember the pages came from the back of the book, so the month must have been December. The torn edges curled slightly, there were small, discoloured holes where the stitching had been, and the paper itself was thin and transparent. I wrote my name on each page as large as I could. Ownership began here. I was about four years old and got a severe telling off, but it was worth it. Later I heard my mother tell a visitor that I loved to rip paper. I was, she stated, a nightmare. My love affair with torn paper continues to this day although it was some time before I understood that destruction is part of creativity. During the years when I used to paint full time I kept dozens of sketchbooks. I had made friends with another, more established artist who had the most wonderful books filled with effortless drawings and strong, confident watercolours. At first I tried to copy her but somehow text always strayed onto my pages, giving them a feel that was, thankfully, entirely my own.
In those days I didn’t travel abroad much and my best sketchbooks were the ones I made on my annual trip to Cornwall. Day after day I would sit on the beach drawing my children as they played. Small children do not stay in one place for long and I learnt to draw quickly, in situ, using whatever came to hand: thin pencils, graphite sticks, pen and black ink. In the margins of the pages I wrote short, acerbic stories about the people with whom I shared the beach. I would fill other pages with found objects, scraps of metal, exquisite slivers of driftwood bleached by the sea, all perfect as collage material. My books were beginning to be objects in themselves; a warehouse of memory distilled from each summer.
Back at home in the dark winter days they were a poignant reminder of my desire to capture the passage of time. Years passed in this way. Then to my dismay the local shop discontinued the darkgreen sketchbooks I used. But I had begun to write anyway, I was busy with other things and had no time to draw. The sketchbooks were consigned to the loft where they remain to this day. I wrote furiously and took to keeping notes for my novels in larger, more impersonal exercise books, or, as more often was the case, on the computer.
One day, soon after my first novel was accepted for publication, I was given a small notebook with a black cover. The paper inside reminded me of the diary I had once destroyed. However, the cover disturbed me. It was too clean, too ordered, too smooth for someone as chaotic as me. So I did the only thing possible. I ripped it off. Instantly I could breathe again. Then I made my own cover. A collage of faded sepia photos, found on foraging expeditions to flea markets: sad faces from unknown pasts.
I was not painting. The novels were taking up every waking moment of my life. My studio had shrunk to a table on the landing, my oils were drying out. And although I missed the mess and smell of paint, the way the hand and eye worked together creating narrative through colour and line, I could not see the use of a sketchbook. I no longer sat dreaming on a Cornish beach. Now my husband and I travelled to Italy, accompanied by whichever reluctant adolescent happened to be around. I took my new, unused notebook with me.
Sitting in a café, hesitantly I began to draw. Almost instantly a story started to take shape. Word and image jostled for attention. Keeping my handwriting as small as possible, I wrote a character piece called ‘The Woman Who Loved Concrete’. Then I drew the woman. Even now, whenever I pick up that particular notebook, I am transported back to the sunlight on the oleander plants and the smell of strong black coffee that filtered through the shutters of the Italian piazza. The switch is instantaneous and needs no further explanation.
Since that first one I have become obsessed all over again by the keeping of notebooks, with their collage of found images, their drawings and the stories that later creep into my novels. They are my precious resources. For in them exists the relationship between work (my novels and paintings) and my personal life. Nowhere else but in these small objects, with their stolen papers and pasted memories, is the connection stronger.
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