Hiraku Suzuki
I started drawing with silver at some point. Sometimes I’ve even felt like I became just another silver marker. But that’s all just part of drawing, and it brought me where I am at this point. One thing I’m sure of is that, no matter what changes of place and time, I’ll continue to live through drawing.
The important thing is to always discover the new point, and try to be activated by it. Never fall back on previous forms. This is the opposite of striving for new ideas. There is a path that led me here, and the signs are always just ahead of me on the road, like perfect-sized pebbles, mixed in with all of the trash and dog shit that’s there too. If I always try to look straight ahead or upward, I’ll miss them.
I find these signs on chilly nights, after an evening of laughing and discussing, or sharing joy and struggle with friends I respect, after our hugs and farewells, on the walk back home. I find the signs in music I haven’t heard for a while, or when I open the pages of the book that has been closed for too long.
And when I find the signs I need to restart drawing. I touch things. I smell them. I strain my ears to hear them. I find an exact point, amidst all of the cacophony of constant change around me. And I pierce the space, using the tip of the silver marker, filled with mineral powder: as the shining blade. This is the paradoxical place where everything becomes its inverse. How far can I excavate from that point, that singular moment, which eclipses life and everything else?
How vivid can I remain? Vivid about what’s happening now, right here and far away, vivid about what has happened in the past or what will someday come to be. It requires pushing the news of the day to the recesses of my spirit, yet still harvesting the pain to drive me forward. The only way to generate an alternative language, a method for newly corresponding with the world, is to just keep at it.
The point born where the tip of the marker touches the surface becomes a line with movement. It looks like a river seen from the sky above. Ripples in the water’s surface reflect the light. Nearby I can see some human-like forms. Languages are invented at the riversides, and with them new civilizations begin. For a brief moment it invokes childhood memories. Memories from before I myself learnt language. The line seeks deeper, and layers form, following the memories of an unpopulated world, of minerals, of planets, of things which have yet to happen.
The accumulated trajectories of all dots and lines reflect light, imprinting resonances into our eyes.
Maybe silver ink is a catalyst for an imaginary silver halide photography. It develops in the now, ever into the present, never remaining in the past.
November 2019
contribution to the monograph “SILVER MARKER Drawing as Excavating”
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