Helen Kellock
♦ Repetition ♦
The city
The city is
The city is like— No. That is destined to be a mediocre simile at best.
The city of Glasgow is grey— Too obvious.
The city lies somewhere between black and white.
The city is a constant intermediate between black and white.
Oh God, Robbie has already sketched out half of Buchanan Street. I better hurry up.
The city is a constant intermediate between black and white.
This isn’t a fair match. I can sit here trying as hard as I can to capture it, but that grey that I am trying to get at comes out of his graphite stick as soon as he presses it down onto the paper. What is the point in describing grey when you can just show it instead?
The city is a constant intermediate between black and white. The greyness hangs everywhere. Circling round you, seeping through you.
I wonder how he would draw that though, that seeping? I bet he couldn’t. That would be too difficult to draw, grey seeping through you. Although maybe he would smudge the graphite a bit to make it look like everything was blurring together? What do I know. The height of my artistic talents was that one time I burnt the edges of my drawing with a lighter in high school. I suppose that woman he’s drawn in the bottom-right corner could be seen to seep into the grey though. The marks that make her are so light and indistinct it’s almost as if she vanishes into the scene.
seeping through you . . .
Well, what’s the point in this then? If the grey and the seeping can be found in his drawing, what are my words doing? Or for him, if my words are there, why is his work needed? One just makes the other an accessory. How depressing. At two a.m. over a few beers it had sounded like a stroke of genius—a cross-pollination between the arts, a collaboration, a true synthesis of words and images—but now at three p.m. on a Tuesday it just feels like a boring act of repetition.
God, three sentences in is too soon to be quite this cynical. It can’t be completely pointless, can it? There has to be something different about the two. Well, maybe there is. There is something about the openness of his drawing; his marks don’t tell you where to go. My words are open too, but they seem to order their openness a little more. Your eyes brush along them and feel their meaning like little hooks. Maybe that is reason to put them together? One helps order the other? At least a little?
Och, I don’t know. But I said I’d do it now and the funding application is due for next week.
The city is a constant intermediate between black and white. The greyness hangs everywhere. Circling round you, seeping through you. The faces . . .
♦ ♦ ♦
Biography
Helen Kellock is a visual artist and writer, based in MANY studios, Glasgow. She is currently working on a series of short stories which explore the relationship between image and text.