Kat Johnston

Tag: Sad

  • Sketch: I have a boo-boo… and it isn’t fixed yet.

    Kat Johnston Sketch: I had to go to the doctor today… and you know what he said? Go get an MRI… then come back.

    Today has been an especially long, long day. I won’t go into the gory details (not that they are all that gory), but suffice to say, when the day starts sometime around 2am with a hospital visit, it is sure to turn into a long day.

    As it so happens, I had to go to the doc today as well – the 2am trip was not for me. I’ve had a little problem with my knee for the past few months, and it has been utterly annoying, because I have to avoid putting pressure on it, bumping it, or otherwise disturbing my poor silly knee. After going to the GP and getting an ultrasound done, the verdict was fairly simple: go see another doctor. Today I finally go in to see the orthopedic specialist, and after about 5 minutes, he goes, ‘Go downstairs and book an MRI, then make another appointment to see me.’

    As happy as I am that I didn’t have to sit around all day, waiting for my appointment, it did seem fairly pointless to go in, have him prod my knee for a minute, and go, ‘eh, go get another scan.’ I mean, I understand if it is necessary, but I wish that someone else would have seen that it would have been necessary, so that I didn’t have to wait a month for this appointment, and then potentially have to wait another month (or longer, who knows…) for the next.

    With all that aside, however, this is what I was drawing while I was waiting for my appointment. Perhaps I was overdoing it just a little with the personal pity party of one, but it just happened to make me smile.

  • Angela… my characters are sad right now, and I don’t know why.

    Another little character, again with a little tinge of sadness.

    I am surprised, sometimes, by the way my little drawings turn out. It isn’t a matter of skill or mastery – if I do a ‘bad’ drawing, I do a bad drawing… it is nothing huge. You toss away the piece of paper and you start over. That isn’t what surprises me. What does surprise me is that I don’t always seem to have the ability to pick the way they are going to turn out. I can have one thing in mind, but once pen touches paper… it doesn’t seem as if it is always up to me. Is that odd?

    Take Angela here for example. She was meant to be happy. She was going to be happy. But she’s not. I’ve drawn another character with a tinge of sadness, though it wasn’t my original intention.

    It irks me sometimes that I don’t seem to have full control over my pen some days. Don’t get me wrong: I know how to draw a happy face, I know how to draw a sad face, I can force things into being one way or another… but I find that it is always better not to force it. As much as a writer or a film-maker must tend to think of their characters as alive, as living, breathing, full creations and people in their own right, so too do I tend to do so. Although most only have one little moment in which to shine, I still can’t let them be other than who they are. To force a full, beaming smile would be wrong for Angela right now: it is just not who she is. Does that make sense?

    It is annoying, in a way… if I want to draw a happy, beaming girl plucked from the recesses of my imagination, it isn’t always the best sensation to find out that the beaming happiness is just a front… and that the true self is not quite so joyous. When Angela first popped into my head, she was younger, trick-or-treating with her much older sister and her own little twin. They actually had rather an interesting contraption they would sit on to move from house to house. They even entered a new-age style of store and talked to the woman behind the counter.

    The entire time, Angela was beaming and happy, though perhaps a little fickle as young children are. Her costume was an identical match to her identical twin’s, though the colours were inverted: a long shift dress, with a long vest-style overcoat, one piece in light brown, the other in dark. A witch’s hat matched, and she carried a hand-made straw broom, tied with twine where the bristles met the handle, to keep them all secure. She and her twin had so much fun creating them: they created their whole outfits from scratch, with help. They weren’t masterful, but they were incredible and perfect in the eyes of the children, and to most of the others who saw them. There were children who would tease, because the girls couldn’t afford the elaborate bought costumes they had… but the girls weren’t upset for the most part. They had each other and even if their family couldn’t even afford proper shoes to go with their costumes, you can bet that they had more fun in them than even the most expensively attired child would have.

    Anyhow… all that aside (and I could go on for hours – it was a rather detailed dream), when I decided to draw her afterwards, she wasn’t the same smiling, bubbly young girl she was in that vision. Time had changed her and taken away something she might never be able to regain. Perhaps I will get an actual story out of her one day, but for now, I don’t think that she wants me to pry.

  • My in-flight sketching.

    The return trip to Sydney, just before my cheese, tomato, ham, lettuce and chutney sammie. And an apple. I like Qantas: they don’t charge me for a sandwich.

    This was a little sketch I threw together while in the air on the way back to Brissie. Really just a quick something to occupy my mind in the moments between here and there, really – not based on anyone in particular. I do think she’s a cutie though. She’s fun-loving and sweet, but there’s always something a little sad about her, a little shadow of something that sits behind her left shoulder… not quite sure what it is. It isn’t anything horrendous, or evil, just a little persistent sadness that flits around the edges of her being, never too far away from her thoughts, even though happiness might try to drown it out occasionally. Oddly enough, the times that are meant to be most joyous tends to bring that little nagging something back for her most strongly – while everyone in laughing and clapping during a party, her mind has wandered off to other things, deepened a sense of loneliness already too present within her…

    Wow… that’s rather depressing, isn’t it now! I don’t particularly know why I am getting this from her, but it is just the way it is. Some of the people who leap from my mind are happy, quirky, outrageous creatures who hardly have a smack of anything too much deeper about them. Or if they do have something deeper, I can at least tell what it is. This girl? I just don’t know. I don’t think that she was ever one of those ‘out there’ type of people, but something happened… something that brought this haze of unhappiness over to shroud her, something she cannot forget, but wouldn’t want to. There are some things that although we say we want to forget, we hold them close. We don’t actually wish to forget them, so much of the time, just find a way to let go of the pain that comes along with them. A task more easily set than possibly achieved.

  • Another day, another sketch.

    Kat Johnston Sketch - another night of marketing, another random sketch, another day closer to the end of the semester.

    Another random sketch and one I do not yet think is complete. She’s telling me she wants more and I’m telling her ‘later’ because I need to throw something up onto the site now! So I will throw up a ‘completed’ one later, if a completed one later happens to exist. It started off with the face, and then the curves down below… then things sort of started growing from there. Where it will go… I actually have an inkling or two, but I’m going to keep them to myself and leave it as a surprise when you see more of her.

    A little interesting link today, because I know how much I love finding these little gems of the internet: One Mile Scroll, which I discovered through my twitter feed thanks to @caroline, another twitter user. It turns one whole mile into a scrollable webpage, complete with the option to contribute height markers along the way to make the scroll more interesting. A novel way to deliver little factoids alongside transforming “virtual space into an actual, physical distance”.

    I must admit, I wasn’t expecting Twitter to be of much ‘use’ to me when I started playing around with it, but I have actually been finding it incredibly fun to get involved with it. Yay Twitter! Oh, if you happen to want to join me on twitter, the username is KatJohnston (original I know), or you can just click here to see my Twitter profile. An incentive for joining me there? I send out an update on Twitter automatically each time I post a new entry on here – so you can be the first to know when something goes up!

    Edit: just adding in another interesting little link because I am sure that some others would enjoy it as much as I do. Before I die I want to… is a project that takes snapshots of people with polaroid cameras (who have stopped producing their materials and is thus ‘dying’ in its own right) with their hand-written statement of what they want to do before they die on their photograph. The site then states that it wants to go back and actually find out if people have done what they have set out to do after a good period of time has elapsed. I love the concept behind this, and the execution is also just great. Well worth a look. Uhh, and if anyone happens to have a polaroid camera and some film in Brisbane and doesn’t mind taking a shot of me, I’d love to have my picture up there too! Can anyone hook me up?

  • Haroset (the simple joy of learning).

    Kat Johnston Portrait - Her name is haroset. I have yet to discover quite why. She does not wish to be completed.

    This young lady came to me one evening not so long ago, as I was aimlessly dragging my pen across the blank page. She started letting me see a little of her… then stopped. She did not want to be touched further, to be altered, or pressured more in any way. So I retreated, pen in hand, simply to look at her as she is. She does not wish to be completed.

    Her name is Haroset. She chose it, not I. It is a word I came across not knowing the meaning of, so discovering that she wanted it as her moniker, I had to look it up. Haroset, or Charoset as it is also known, is:

    “…a sweet, dark-colored, lumpy paste made of fruits and nuts served primarily during the Passover Sedar. Its color and texture are meant to recall the mortar with which the Israelites bonded bricks when they were enslaved in Ancient Egypt… Despite its symbolism, the charoset is a tasty concoction and is a favorite of children. During the Seder meal, it may be eaten liberally, often spread on matzah.” (Wikipedia, 2008)

    I’m still trying to work out why it fits her, why she requested to be named in this way… perhaps it is a childhood nick-name, a reminder of a better time when she would happily sit with her family and show such fondness for this fruit-filled paste. Perhaps she sat upon her grandfather’s knee as he explained the significance and meaning behind the meal; she listening with rapt attention, with the fascination only a child who loves to learn can truly show. Even we ‘grown-ups’ who love to learn and long to know most everything never quite get that same incredible glow to our face and shine in our eyes that they do, even when we do come close.

    I love the way that children absorb information, taking it in before then racing off to find someone to tell – just as if this new little gem of knowledge is as significant and treasured as a new toy, to be shown off to the delighted squeals of ‘Guess what I know!’ or ‘You’ll never guess!’, with the little girl making her friends beg her to tell them until she imparts this special information on only the most worthy of her equals.

    For some reason, it always makes me smile, when I see that happen, when I see someone with a simple passion to learn and in part, to also teach. Perhaps my same smile is one that Haroset longs for.