Go and open the door.
Maybe outside there is a tree, or a wood, a garden, or a magic city.
Go and open the door.
Maybe a dog’s rummaging. Maybe you’ll see a face, or an eye, or the picture of a picture.
Go and open the door. If there’s a fog it will clear.
Go and open the door. Even if there’s only the darkness ticking, even if there’s only the hollow wind, even if nothing is there, go and open the door.
At least there’ll be a draught.
The Door, by Miroslav Holub
from Poems Before & After: Collected English translations (Bloodaxe Books, 2006) ...
She went to the door. It was open. And she walked through it ... into the world she had painted. Into the eye she had seen when she stared through the lens. The reflection of her own eyelashes.
Since the children came, she could not sleep. So she went to the willow by the water, cut a few long branches. She charred them in the fire. When they cooled, she broke off a piece.
It was still warm in her hand. Silver ebony, it was silken, and the powder found the lines in her palm. She sat by the fire, cross-legged. Her hand made circles on the page. Black lines that merged into shadows. And her hand built walls, raised beams. The pitch was not fixed. The windows shifted as in dreams.
And the house became a door. The walls dissolved, and the floors fell. The ceiling disappeared. Finally, the interior unfolded itself and walked outside.
Drawing is for me a meditation. It is thinking through, a transcription of what I've seen or imagined. It is a rehearsal for the play of a painting. Drawings are little poems without words. Diagrams for worlds I have yet to build. When my children came, there was so little time and energy to do anything ambitiously creative. To draw was to make a note for an idea - to which I could return years later. Sleep still eludes me, even now. But the ideas are recorded on paper, often with black charcoal, an ancient medium - at once fragile and brittle - capable of describing shadows, abyss, the infinite, and inferring their opposites.
...
Egress
charcoal on paper