Tabi-Kei: Travelscapes
Shinro Ohtake

People travel for different reasons. Sometimes I think about what others consider necessities for travelling, the things they'll pack on the eve of departure, just out of idle curiosity. My own necessities for travel, however, are few: my drawing supplies and a simple camera. It's been the same ever since I first went to Hokkaido at age eighteen.
In drawing supplies I don't need anything special. Maybe five brush pens - the kind they sell at any stationery shop in Japan - some pencils, coloured pencils, a utility blade, a short ruler, a hardcover sketchbook and memo pads. Into the suitcase they go and I'm pretty much in travel mode.
With only these things I can while away just about any dull moments. They rank higher on my list than a laptop or paperback reading material. Who's got time to be sending emails from the airport or reading someone else's made-up stories? I've got to create.
Wherever I travel I draw scenes and people, whatever passes before my eyes. It excites me just to see the picture pages increase as I jot down the place and date of each drawing.
I've been sketching with brush-pens for twenty-five years and I never get tired. I can scarcely wait for the ink to dry on each page. The very first ink stroke often disappoints, but as I dash off drawings and watch my travel time fix itself in pictures, it all becomes fabulous play. There is nothing better.
The instant something hits my eyes, I know: this one's brush-pen, this one's pencil, that's collage or better snap a photo. The feeling comes over me that I've got to get this down and fast, and off I go chasing after the minutes flying by at crazy speeds.
Over a decade ago, I visited Picasso's beloved Malaga, then crossed the Strait of Gibraltar to fiery Morocco. On disembarking in Tangier, I experienced a wondrously different sense of time. Heading up into the town backlit by the sun, everything I saw clamoured at me with poignant insistence. Now and again, strange flashes of envy claimed me, yearnings irradiated with midday Moroccan heat.
In Japan, or any destination for that matter, I have almost no interest in scenic spots. More often the things that move and surprise me are crumbling old house walls, cardboard boxes abandoned in alleys on rubbish collection days, derelict buildings and ancient signboards. The moment I see them, in slips some mysterious phantom and I react.
I don't even try to understand the sights and things I'm seeing. The immediate atmosphere, the spectacle, some ineffable presence permeates my being. Sometimes I'll do a simple placement sketch and note the colours in words; other times I'll take a quick memo snapshot, whatever it takes to remember the "feel" of the situation-in-progress. That's the important thing: to keep that complex mix of wind, temperature, humidity, smells and light in the act of seeing.
Only very rarely does the feeling of it all stay with me for very long. But then years later, everything will suddenly come back to me with startling clarity, and I'll want to draw some place I visited all over again.
It's been over ten years since I returned from Morocco, but even now the "Morocco bug" still squirms inside me at regular intervals, and the infestation continues to incite still other inspirations. The sights that first fell on my retinae there keep shooting through me across time, bringing odd tabi-kei "travelscapes" to mind along with new creative urges.
"Travel and time" parallels "picture and self" to an uncanny degree. Then as now, such thoughts always cross my mind whenever I pack my sketchbook in my suitcase on the eve of departure.