Rebecca Swindell, Three Weeks in Summer

A diary, by its very nature, is personal, a place where private feelings are given an outlet, so why would an artist put something so personal on public display? What revelations can we expect? And how do these insights reflect our lives? Diary Drawing at the Centre for Diary Drawing, curated by Sarah Lightman, provides an opportunity to find out.

The gallery’s intimate space is ideal for the similarly intimate visual journals and autobiographical graphic novels displayed. The subject of each diary is different, yet despite this there is something in all of them that we, the viewer, can relate to.

Ultimately, as Lightman says, the stories depict a universal humanity: illness, journeys, performance, family, love, heartache; they are “everyman’s diary”, or, as exhibitor, David Blandy puts it, the “diary of nobody”. In essence these are the same things, “the diary” for Blandy represents the banality of an artists life. It takes away from the notion of “artistic genius” and says we are all human beings. Blandy’s diary depicts the two-week period he spent living as a hermit in Painshill Park in Surrey.

Lightman, also exhibiting, portrays the heartache she felt while she was being dumped over the phone. She does this with a set of three drawings set in the place where it happened. Lightman has an honesty with words, which combined with the stark illustrations conveys a sadness: “I wanted to make a linear visual story of how I was feeling – in fact in the end everything became an emblem: isolated objects, an empty bench.“ For Lightman the entire process of art making: the conception, the result and talking about the work is, paradoxically, life affirming – these are the tools that help her move on. “I even went back to the scene of the crime, as it were, to take photos. I call it crisis management.”

And, this is a theme that threads through a lot of the work on display. There’s a sense that the diaries serve a therapeutic purpose, an opportunity to bring into the open feelings that would otherwise fester.

‘My Diary’ by Mio Matsumo tells the story of how Matsumo discovered a boil on her tongue that turned out to be cancer. She wrote and drew the events as they happened, from eating lunch at the hospital, to figuring out if she’d ever be able to kiss her boyfriend again. With the diary (published by Jonathan Cape in July 2008) Matsumo wants to help others who are going through similar experiences communicate with their friends and family – as it helped her.

Her imperfect life at the time combined with the imperfect writing, which, because of her Japanese background, is half English and half not, makes us believe that we are being offered a genuine insight into who she really was at the time, while in the same instance the language provides a respite of humour.

Oliver East takes us on a journey through Norway. “Trains Are Mint…4” (self-published) is about East’s attempt to test a Norwegian law that states you can camp near anyone’s house as long as it’s 150 metres away. “I would follow the train line and camp near which ever house was closest to it, which helped me concentrate on other things,” he says. The diary, filled with humorous writing and simple drawings, depicts moments of awkwardness that we can all relate to.

Miriam Katin’s work is about how, as a young girl, she and her mother struggled to survive the Holocaust. The scene on display is about her parents reuniting after the war, and looks at how she felt as a child. Her drawings are graceful, yet at the same time bleak, because of the horrific period in history they reflect: “Before I drew my graphic novel, I would start choking. After I had drawn it, this ceased to happen.” Her book is called ‘We Are On Our Own’ (published by Drawn and Quarterly in 2006).

The exhibition is exposing, touching and often contradictory. Other exhibitors are Ariel Schrag who offers a comic look at her time studying in Berlin, Rutu Modan tells us some family secrets. Alex Fox provides us with his medical history, Gabrielle Bell, about swapping shoes, Lady Lucy shows us what her friends and family have said to her over the past eight years – and Rebecca Swindell demonstrates that even when it’s wet there are some things that can be drawn on.

Words: Deborah Harris