The first School Sketchbook is oddly the best preserved of the nine
Schoolbooks that span Naomi’s eighth school year. Devoid of the
degradation originating from forced exposure to damp and water evident
in the later books, the document’s original leaves remain intact
excepting the several pages that were removed by the young artist and
several ‘lost’ pages that have been reclaimed (and re-attached)
by the youngster’s grandmother in a substandard restoration attempt.
The book actually predates the beginning of the school year (no teacher
scrawls are visible), spanning from the closing days of July to late August
1990. The artist marks the initial page as the 23rd of July and all remaining
pages are indexed with both a date and the young girl’s monogram.
Schoolbook one’s bindings are emblazoned with a plethora of naturalistic
quotations and stickers, issuing the sunny side of a lifelong residency
in the ‘Garden of England’; toads, cats and manifold vegetation
conspicuous amongst the dense composition. Here, one finds a visual echo
between sketchbook integument and substance with many of the document’s
pages littered with cuttings from which the cover decorations are taken
(all sourced from collected ‘nature’ magazines belonging to
the artist’s mother Vanessa Jelish).
The equine interruptions that pepper the early Extraneous
Drawing’s capture of David Jelish’s downfall also dominate the pages of the
initial Schoolbook. Indeed any reference to her father’s medical
difficulties remains absent from the book; Naomi contenting herself to
record the locale of her geographical rather than her mental environ.
Sharing ledger space with the horses are exhaustive studies of the Jelish
pets and the sites in which both family and creatures find their leisure.
Within the corpus of Jelish documents it rapidly grows apparent that the
meadow in which the horse grazes borders both a body of water (her “favourite
place in all of Gravesend”) and a cemetery - two sites that will
continue to haunt the burgeoning diarist’s avowals. Unbeknown to
their creator, the conflation of images concurrent in the both opening
Extraneous Drawings and the first Schoolbook provide a posticous union
of motifs; horse, father, water, and (subsequently) tomb infused in a
psychic (and scopic) consommé of interdependency, the full extent
of which will only be recognized through later Extraneous
Drawings (see
ED.70-71).