Freehand
A pleasant surprise: One of my artworks from college turned up (of all places) on Facebook, posted a few days ago by a dear classmate Pie, who earlier picked it out from an online photo album kept by one of our juniors in Journalism class. It was a drawing of a winged human figure in a pensive, seated pose, head bowed in reflection but with the wings (fashioned out of newspaper clippings) already spread out and picking up some wind and confidence for his maiden flight. The aspiring flyer also holds a giant quill. And any alumni would easily recognize that the platform – the launching pad — on which this Icarus rests sported the design and inscriptions of the Journ dress pin.
‘’Thoughts Before Take-Off,’’ the tagline read. Meant as a symbol of our graduating batch, the pen-and-ink drawing adorned the cover of a souvenir magazine we put together that final summer of our heady UST days.
And so it was really great to see the whole thing retrieved from someone’s collection of campus souvenirs and ‘’reissued’’ on the web – the magazine now yellowing and all – 17 years later.
Indeed a welcome development because 1) I seemed to have lost my OWN copy of that souvenir mag along with my copies of The Flame, our college journal where I had short stories, poems, feature articles, and, yes, maybe around 20 more drawings published; and 2) the past of couple of weeks have had me wondering whether I still possess the lightness of pen-in-hand, the steadiness of line and curve, to revive a long-unperformed art. One of these days I should pick up a sketchbook again and find out how shaky or stiff the strokes would go. (No doubt I’ve been shaky or stiff in some other endeavors, but of course that’s another story and has no place in a decent, service-oriented, and utterly self-effacing blog such as this.)
For now I’m just glad to see, courtesy of a thoughtful friend, a personal memento from a time when we still worked largely the old-fashioned, freehand way, unaided by Photoshop, etc.; a cool download from my sticky, ink-stained past.
