maiji: summer afternoon

[image set: 1) Photo of open notebook next to two glass dip pens, one slightly sanded down with a blunt tip. The page shows a haiku written in bold coral ink with scribbles of cloud and grass-like shapes in blue, pink, brown blending into each other and forming purples, mauves and taupes where they meet. 2) Eight swatches laid out in neat rows next to a mini flashcard set being used as an ink colour swatchbook. 3) In-progress photo showing an open notebook at an early stage of the illustration, where it is just the lines of poetry in bold coral with drops of ink splattered around it. Around the open book are paper towels, an open sketchbook with scribbled drafts, a dip pen resting against a ceramic water pot, a bottle of ink and the edges of the swatchbook. 4) An angled closeup of the illustration showing the gold shimmer coming through parts of the ink.] summer afternoonmy father's harmonicahasn't sung a note - Poetry and art by Maiji/Mary Huang, humangray.com What do you think of when you hear (or see) the words “summer afternoon”? What kind of mood does that stir in you? This haiku went through quite a number of different ideas, all of them playing with sights, activities, sensations, and so on that, to my imagination, evoke a feeling of things that could go on and on. A lazy summer afternoon kind of feeling, when there’s nothing you have to do, and anything you do do feels like it could stretch into forever. You know what I mean?Lazy afternoons do make my mind wander, and funnily enough I found that happening in what I was writing too. The poems started to stretch out in that wondering direction, juxtaposing the sense of things feeling like they could go on forever with a sense of looking back - or looking forward - from a vantage point where we know that the things won’t - or didn’t.One afternoon I went out for a walk, poetry on the brain and sorting things out in my head. All along the trail I listened to the sound of cicadas chirping noisily in the fields. They’re such an ubiquitous sound at this time of the year, and I wrote a few “summer afternoon” haiku with them as well, but it didn’t feel quite “there”. While meditating on sound, however, I suddenly recalled: when I was very little, my father was usually away due to work. As a child I rarely saw him except in the summer. I do remember late summer afternoons, the shadows of evening seeping in as we sat in the backyard, and hearing tunes flow from his harmonica. He’s retired now, and I haven’t heard him play in years.For this illustration, I didn’t really have a strong sense of the visual direction, and in a lot of ways I think it came out more scattered and haphazard and messier than most of the other pieces to date. This makes perfect sense because my mind was feeling scattered and haphazard and messy. You can actually see in the WIP that I changed one of the words at the last second, scribbling over it and wiping it out and rewriting anew underneath. Also, I wanted to use warm colours for a summer afternoon, especially the colour orange. But I don’t have any orange inks, and I didn’t want to use some of the more yellow inks I have already used in the series this soon, and since one of the original objectives of this series was to use up my existing inks, it didn’t make sense to buy an orange ink… I picked some colours I thought could give me that warm vibe, and it created an energy that probably wouldn't have happened without that constraint. Overall, it’s interesting seeing how this turned out, especially when I step back and look at it as part of the whole haiku ink series.