Kerrand’s sketchbook

Kerrand’s sketchbook makes the act of drawing tangible: a book carried from place to place, tested against the resistance of paper, and filled with images that transform Sokcho into a monochrome story world. Its significance lies not only in what it records but in how its drawings change—from painstaking, repeatedly corrected figures to open pages where light, blankness, and dissolution become part of the narrative. In the hands of Yan Kerrand, the sketchbook is both working instrument and an unfinished story; when the narrator opens it, its last images offer a visual ending without resolving everything they contain.

Material and Working Method

Kerrand’s attention to drawing begins before the first mark. In a Lotte Mart, he turns a pen in his hand, then tests paper by opening packages, feeling different textures, scrunching sheets, touching them to his lips, and tasting an edge. The narrator hides the opened blocks beneath binders while he continues searching. He wants bottles of ink rather than cartridges, and prefers Korean ink to the Japanese ink available for testing because the Japanese ink dries too quickly. After the assistant yields to the request, Kerrand makes a few trial lines in a clothbound sketchbook he takes from his coat pocket. He ultimately buys the Japanese ink. The scene establishes the book as a portable work surface, but also shows how exacting his materials are: paper and ink are not interchangeable supplies but substances whose feel and behavior matter to the work.

The sketchbook accompanies Kerrand beyond the guest house. During a two-hour climb, he stops on a rock, tightens his laces, and begins sketching bamboo with his pen and notepad. Asked whether he carries the sketchpad all the time, he says that he does so most of the time. Its presence makes drawing a practice woven into movement and looking: a pause on the climb can become a working moment, just as paper shopping becomes a search for the right surface. The notebook is less a record kept after experience than a tool brought into the encounter with it.

Images, Revision, and Erasure

The narrator also sees what happens when a drawing develops under pressure rather than reaching a settled form. Through a half-open door, she watches Kerrand work over a sheet balanced on a box in his lap. His pencil moves unevenly, hesitates, and returns over earlier lines. An indistinct tangle gradually resolves into an eye and then a woman, whose large eyes and tiny mouth initially seem complete. Kerrand continues. He twists the lips, warps the chin, and distorts the face before daubing ink across the page until the woman becomes a misshapen black mass. Ink drips to the floor; a spider runs up his leg, and he does not brush it away. He tears off a corner of the paper and chews it.

A later drawing repeats the movement from emergence to destruction in a different form. Kerrand sketches a woman’s torso on a futon, filling in the wooden floor and bedding before giving her eyes. As he draws her mouth, her teeth appear in laughter. He knocks over the inkpot; the woman seems to reel, and ink passes between her lips until the image is blacked out. These scenes make the sketchbook’s work inseparable from revision and erasure. A figure can come close to life, yet further marks do not necessarily perfect it: they may deform or extinguish it. The repeated passage from outlined woman to ink-covered page gives the materials a visible consequence. Ink makes the image possible and can also overwhelm it.

Sokcho Transformed into a Comic World

The narrator later recognizes places from Sokcho inside Kerrand’s drawings. In the pages spread across his desk, the hero arrives in a town whose hotels she knows; the frontier becomes a scribble of barbed wire, and the cave with its Buddhas is carried into the invented setting. These scenes show the sketchbook absorbing the narrator’s world and recasting it in shades of grey. Its images belong to the visual language of Kerrand’s published series, whose tenth and final volume is due the following year: a globe-trotting archaeologist travels through a different location in each book, in monochrome ink wash, with no dialogue and very few words. The published hero resembles Kerrand, standing out against figures often shadowed or partly concealed by details such as a chair, stone, or leaf. The sketchbook extends that practice while taking in the specific landscape around him.

Kerrand’s approach to light becomes clearest in a drawing of a snowy mountaintop. The page gives only a few lines to the rocks; most of it remains blank. The narrator initially thinks of Sokcho as colourful, but looking again she sees the white space between the lines as snow, bright enough to seem touchable. Other panels appear to blur and distort at their frames, as if the central figure were struggling to escape their confines, while time seems to expand. The sketchbook’s spareness is therefore not simply an absence of detail. Blank paper carries the snow and light, and the frame itself can feel unstable. The drawings ask the viewer to perceive what the ink leaves open.

The Sketchbook’s Last Story

After Kerrand is gone from the room, the narrator finds his frayed canvas sketchbook on the desk. Curtains are drawn, the quilt is folded, dust floats through a beam of light, and the smell of incense remains. She sets down a platter, sits carefully on the bed, and notices the fish and the ink stain at its foot; she thinks that the stain, too, will fade. Then she picks up the book and opens it. These details place the act of reading among traces that are already diminishing. The sketchbook remains as a material object, but what it contains will not hold still as a finished account.

Its first large image places Kerrand’s hero and a heron together on a winter shore, with a snow-covered mountain behind them. The bird is old, one-legged, and silver-feathered; water spurts from its beak as a river flowing toward the ocean. In subsequent pages, ageless, faceless people leave faint yellow and blue traces in wet sand. They walk out of the frames as the sea spreads past the beach and into the sky. The place seems to take shape in the moment of conception and then dissolve, a threshold where falling snow meets sea spray. The images widen the story beyond the contained panels that previously seemed to confine its figure.

As the narrator turns more pages, the story fades from her gaze: the heron closes its eyes, the paper becomes blue, and a man feels his way through winter before slipping beneath the waves. A woman’s body survives as an afterimage—shoulder, belly, breast, and lower back—whose lines taper into a fine stroke on the thigh. That line becomes a scar, brushed onto the scales of a fish. The ending does not restore the earlier figures or explain the scar; it carries an image of the body into another form. The sketchbook’s last movement—from framed drawings to spreading colour, from a person to a trace on a fish—makes its incompletion part of its force. What remains is not a definitive final panel but a visual passage in which the story, like the ink stain by the bed, may fade even as its marks continue to be seen.