what will go on my wall in the museum beside my art:


title:
“Why Seek Ye the Living”

statement:
from the essay “On Drawing” by Jean Fisher, The Stage of Drawing: Gesture and Act

“The daughter of the Corinthian potter Butades is in love with a shepherd who is about to embark on a journey. Desperate to keep hold of him in his absence, at night, in the flickering light of a lamp, she draws the silhouette of his shadow on the wall. And this, it was said, is the origin of drawing… As with Orpheus’s surrender of Eurydice to the underworld, the poem, drawing, or song can only emerge, it seems, through the absence or sacrifice of the loved one.

“In this tale, strictly speaking, what generates the drawing is not loss itself but the girl’s anticipation of loss, captured in the movement of turning away that unites blindness to memory. But her act is not memory as Proustian recollection, but as giving to memory in the act of making: a gift of memory where the act of making is simultaneously an act of memorizing.”