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Taking note
By Nicholas Laughlin
First
published in The Caribbean Review of Books, August 2006
“There was a sadness to his eyes as
he continued to devour yet another victim with as much desire as he
once had so that even with that sad look there was a knowing glint
almost like a looking of amusement . . . A small story about hunger and
survival in a small place.”
“Those early days sitting in the water and watching the horizon and
looking backwards to the edge of the island and wondering about the
space in the water and on the edge between what looked infinite and
what appeared to be finite or known and understood allegedly . . .
Further explanations while submerged.”
These lines, with their colliding echoes of Harris and Naipaul and
Lamming, could well have been plucked from a novel or metaphysical
treatise by some unknown, darkly eccentric Caribbean writer. Instead,
rendered in an ornate and nervous script, they are scraps of text from
the edges and corners of a new series of drawings by the Trinidadian
artist Christopher Cozier. “The idea is a kind of associative writing,
a rambling. I’m never sure if they’re explanatory, or if they’re sort
of parallel.”
In his studio in St Ann’s, in the hills north of Port of Spain, Cozier
has pinned some of the drawings to a wall. Others are stacked on a
table. I turn them over like the pages of a book. The title is Tropical Night, which suggests some
version of noir. Dark browns
and sepia tones predominate, and some of the drawings are fragments of
nightmares: a man in a fenced enclosure gobbling human flesh, a Cyclops
stuffing something bloody into its mouth. But Cozier says what he’s
trying to get at is something decidedly more mundane.
“There is a kind of day that is very grey or brown . . . it is a mood
or tone I often feel on a dreary day, waiting for a taxi before it
rains or going to some kind of daily routine . . . It’s the experience
of being on the street in open space, or just inside ourselves. What do
we feel, what do we choose to notice and sense on a given day? It’s
about the internal and external landscape of the place as I experience
it.”
Above all, Tropical Night is
about the very act of drawing. “It’s about investigation, speculation,”
Cozier says. “Drawing is my handwriting, my thought process.” Drawing
is also a deliberate choice, the tentativeness of “notes on little
pieces of paper” his response to the grandiose “millennium talk” of
painting on canvas. “I often use the word ‘note-taking’. Note-taking to
me is conceptually very important. It has to do with notions of being
sure and unsure . . . I feel an empathy with the ephemeral.” And
drawing becomes almost performative: “When I make those marks, there’s
a sense of being alive. It’s a domain of possibility.”
The nine-by-seven-inch Tropical Night
drawings, which Cozier started working on in late 2005, are a kind of
hunkering down, a return to basics, after several busy years of
travelling and showing abroad. “I’m trying to get rid of the
rhetorical, get rid of all the familiar symbolism, and see if I can
arrive at new signs, new symbols. I’m basically extending and expanding
the vocabulary.”
Many of the drawings hint at questions of property, of ownership, of
contested space. One depicts a political announcement in the style of a
fete poster. In another, “Place Your Bets”, a ballot box is branded
with a “Lucky 7”. A dog marks the corners of its territory — the page —
with yellow splashes. A version of an antiquated Old World map appears
again and again: on a blackboard, superimposed over heads with blank
features, and as a ship’s sail mounted on the back of a swimming figure
in a haunting drawing called “Castaway”.
As I sift through the drawings, I sense a narrative struggling to
emerge. “I feel like I’m still on the outside of the story, trying to
get in — it’s very much like a literary enterprise.” For a moment
Cozier sounds like a novelist in the early chapters, still trying to
discern his plot. But later I realise the analogy is false: what
matters is not some elusive narrative thread, but the unresolved state
of being the drawings seem to chart, viewed not singly but en masse. They are, you might say,
snapshots of a stream of consciousness: things imagined or observed,
anxieties, fantasies, ideas obsessively returned to, things felt more
than understood.
I hand Cozier the drawings and he makes a neat pile, perhaps seven
inches high, on a tall stool. We contemplate the bundle.
“Sometimes I wonder if the way to display this work is just a stack of
them in a glass case. You can’t see them, but you know they’re there.
“When you look at that, it’s just so beautiful. It’s a stack of paper,
and all the mysteries that it entails.”

The Tropical Night blog is a creative collaboration between Christopher Cozier and Nicholas Laughlin, evolving from the series
of drawings. See more images from the series in this Flickr photoset.