A New Year now arrives with heads that burst with fierce hangovers, ears that still throb with the leftover beats from screeching dance floors, and eyes that beg for some more sleep. Midway through, perhaps after a sumptuous meal, we settle down comfortably, and we remember our resolutions for the year. We then drag ourselves to the gym, sign up for that music class or embark on our promised no-sweets diet.
The beginning of the year wasn’t always this loud. It didn’t always announce itself in crowds. Generations welcomed it with quiet hopes. Most households would be proud possessors of a brand new diary with the year imprinted on its hard-bound cover, alongside the benefactor — most often a store that one frequented or a bank that safeguarded one’s earnings. Throughout the year, the pages held our thoughts, trivial events, to-do lists, sundry bills, and strict accounts — reminders of our annual existence.
And what would an artist do without these journals? Visual diaries have a rich history. Long before printing presses birthed these packaged pages, cave walls witnessed man’s primitive need to document. The Lascaux caves in France have all the tiny details of prehistoric life, recorded in the colours of the earth. The creation of papyrus made the job easier. One of the oldest diaries in the world is the ‘Diary of Mere’, dating back to the time of the Egyptian Pharaoh Khufu. Written with hieroglyphs, it was a documentation by Mere of the everyday activities of the crew on his boat. As with all things manufactured in the history of the universe, China stepped in soon enough and developed paper in its present form. When the invention crossed the shores, books became accessible globally. And what a boon it turned out to be for artists!
Artists are well known for their diaries. Most of the famous ones have left behind their sketchbooks along with their masterpieces. Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa may smile at us hauntingly from behind bulletproof glass panels, but his sketchbooks are treasure troves that contain a lifetime of his observations. The man wasn’t just an artist. He was an inventor, a scientist, an architect and an engineer. From ideas that pondered the possibility of man flying, the detailed analysis of the human body, the movement of water and drawings for a mechanical man, his diary had it all. He even wrote backwards, using a mirror, so his ideas would be safe from prying eyes.
Legendary Mexican artist Frida Kahlo also got into the habit of writing a diary in the last decade of her life. Perhaps the tormented life that followed her since childhood found its solace in these expressions. Her diary stands testimony to her pain, her joys, her tumultuous relationships in the form of drawings, texts and scribblings. It has been remarked that while she appeared masked in her paintings, her diary revealed her bare, unmasked self.
Our individual purposes to document may be different, but there can be no doubt that self-expression leads to a better understanding of oneself. So this New Year, treat yourself to a journey of self-discovery after all the celebration has faded. Take that journal. Express yourself.