I come back to this space again, after a very long time. In the global dystopian atmosphere of this last year, seems strange to me to post here about happy and serene things. But anyway, here we go, these are the drawings I did in 2019 to document the streets of my city, the places I walk by everyday. These drawings are a diary, a compulsion, a daily habit, a way to alleviate anxiety and to keep my hands busy, a place to hide in, a safe space.
I have this wooden pen since I was a child. My grandparents had their saving accounts at the socialist state owned bank (named CEC) and my grandfather and me would visit our neighborhood branch quite often. They had there these wooden pens and ink bottles for people to fill their paper work with and although I was too small to be really sure about this, I suspect that these pens were one of the reasons we would be there so often. My grandfather knew the women working there and he would enter sometimes just to say hello. While my grandfather was solving his banking things or would chat to the employees, I would draw with these pens and inks. This is such a serene memory for me. At some point one of the women working there gifted me one of the pens. I used it a lot, as a kid but also later in art high school and university.
The small metal box with nibs is my friend’s flea market find. She borrows me the nibs.
This is what’s left of my grandfather’s stationery collection from the seventies and early eighties. He kept his pencils and fountain pens and notebooks in a special drawer and we would take them out sometimes and look at them together, carefully. (He died when I was 6 and he was my only friend till then). There were much more fountain pens and colored pencils, but I used them and gradually lost them in primary and secondary school. There were also more notebooks and I still have those as my diaries from high school. I could never bring myself to write in this last one though, the most melancholy notebook ever. 
Linking up with Vintage Bliss Tuesdays.
stories of objects 