Occasionally the tension generated by the ongoing sequence of hospital descriptions is pinpricked by the addition of scenes that detail the locale of Naomi's back garden and Gravesend's meadows. Placed intermittently amongst the increasingly prolonged succession of images detailing David Jelish's combat with his ailing insides, are meticulous drawings of the horse Naomi yearns to posses. These collections of animal likenesses appear to propel forth feelings of hope and express a burning desire for the youngster to escape. Naomi's motivations become transparent when we note that the young artist refers to the horse as 'Peter' - the name of the young son the Jelish family lost in 1989.
The equine interruptions that pepper the Extraneous Drawing's capture of David Jelish's downfall also extend into the pages of the initial School Sketchpad (SSB.1). It rapidly grows apparent that the meadow in which the horse grazes borders both a body of water and a cemetery - two sites that will continue to haunt Naomi's avowals. Unbeknown to their creator, the conflation of images concurrent in the opening Extraneous Drawings and the first School Sketchbook provide a posticous union of motifs; horse, father, water, tomb infused in a psychic (and scopic) consommé of interdependency, the full extent of which will only be recognized later.
Page 35-36 of School Sketchbook #1
Sharing ledger space with the horses are exhaustive studies of the Jelish's pets and the sites in which both family and creatures find their leisure. Among these is the body of water, Ehrlich's Pond, where David Jelish's heartbeat will eventually cease. The unmistakeable sadness and poignancy of this event in that location becomes jarringly palpable upon the reading of the bewildered youngster's scrawl that the pond is "her favourite place in all of Gravesend". Such a bittersweet aside from the precocious youth.
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