Butterfly
“The fluttering of a butterfly’s wings can effect climate changes on the other side of the planet.“
– – Paul Erlich
“I would like to think that the singer is the butterfly, and the drummer was just the little grub in the ground, working to become a caterpillar.“
– – Robert Wyatt
From now on, I’ll post my drawings weekly, or maybe twice a week. To share the below auto-biographic stories, I’ll keep being creative, transforming my thoughts into words and images.
I started school when I was ten. In primary school, there was no lessons other than Maths and Chinese. The rest were merely reading on your own and doing homework. So basically, I had to skip the rest of the classes to do housework or farmwork. And the teacher used charcoal to write on the wooden board. Not to mention that I never owned any proper paper. One evening after dinner, I invited my best playmate to visit my room. We sat up on the bed face to face, looking into each other. Then we came up with an idea to draw each other’s face. So we used the back page of my Chinese and Math books, which were blank and white. In the end, we looked again and again at the drawings, laughing with pride. Too bad, soon the pictures faded away naturally. Now the drawn face has become vague, but the memory of my very first drawing with a pencil is still vivid.
In middle school, there was a drawing teacher who, I would reckon, was the best and the only drawing teacher in my life. Yet, the lesson was basically the teacher talking and we listening. Not because the teacher didn’t want us to practice drawing but we couldn’t afford the paper and the school couldn’t afford drawing paper for each student. Thus one day, our school held a sort of competition, giving each student one hard white sheet of paper to draw on and a piece of red soft paper to cut. (Paper cutting was very traditional in my hometown. Both weddings and funerals require it absolutely.) I had no idea how to cut properly. Nor did the others. Everyone just cut randomly and chose any picture in the book to draw. To my amazement, my drawing was shown on the wall as the second prize and my cutting paper the first prize. And that was that.
For writing and drawing, no one really cared or cares in my hometown. It was the scores in the examinations that were most important to the parents, the teachers and the schools. Even then, two of my schoolmates, who were really talented at drawing, just become teachers and have a normal family.
But not me! I always want to follow my heart. Many times when there’s an image floating in my head, I believe it would be good if I can put it on paper to make it visible. On February 28th, 2015, I was using the toilet and one image strongly forced me to capture and sketch. So The Left Eye became my first drawing to share here. Then Be Wild and then The Solitary. Now Confusion.
PS: I have been quite “productive” in drawing lately. So this first round is black and white with ballpoint pen. Next will be in color.
Thank you for reading and appreciating! I hope you all are happy doing what you really want! 🙂
A True Outsider Writing 