Illustrations Inspired a career

Illustration from a 1993 diary by Marc PG Berthier.

The things you find when you’re not really looking. Forgotten objects you hold in your hands, only to find yourself transported back in time; a fracture of memory, to a conversation, a laugh, a love, a splinter of a moment. So it is with this diary from 1993. I didn’t write a word in it. it was simply Too beautiful to fill with the mediocrity of a meeting, let alone a list.  

On picking up and re-tracing the emboss with my fingers, yes - I bought it in a shop, on my way back to the marina in Antibes, after an afternoon at the Picasso Museum and before we made our way, up the hill, over to Juan Les Pin to listen to a concert - A night with Ray Charles – a ticket we could barely afford – to drink in haunts of jazz as sound carried through the pine trees, out across the Mediterranean. That endless summer before we had kids.

 If you’d asked me if I still had the diary, I’d have answered, I hope so. But I would have second guessed it had long been lost along the way. And yet now here it is. The cover delicious, but the illustrations, wow. Page after page, a story requiring no words. Their looseness, their freedom, their confidence on the page inspired, for me, my career as a designer, as a writer and definitely as a sailor. I live for an ink pen and a piece of paper and a moment to write a thought and sketch it and lay it down. I have my best ideas on boats. Always have.

// By Sal Balharrie