Cataract Sketchbook

With a title like this, readers might assume that they will see a collection of my own drawings. But this is the title of a beautiful (and shockingly informative) zine by designer Anne Keating.

Keating is a recent grad of the School of Visual Arts in New York. I’ve known many cartoonists who passed through SVA, but Keating’s visual world comes from a different genus of art than cartooning. Although she is not a cartoonist, her zine, Cataract Sketchbook, is full of cartoon-like drawings, illustrating first hand the process of getting cataract surgery. She covers many of the things I’ve mentioned in my last three posts, but more succinctly than me and with more artistic flair. I’m envious.

This 34-page zine is printed expertly on a Risograph, which gives the art a kind of pastel softness. Keating, like me, once her left eye was operated on, saw whites with near psychedelic intensity. And she did the same weird habit that I have of switching between right and left eye to see the difference. She illustrates this effect by showing a van in which the left side of the page is what her left eye sees (a brilliant white workman’s van) and the right side is what her right eye sees (a dingy yellow murder van). But it is the same van.

Keating also makes an attempt to depict the swirling psychedelic pattern one sees during surgery. This was so striking, and I later asked my surgeon what it was I was seeing. She didn’t know—her hypothesis was that it was light being refracted through the crushed up lens that makes this image. But that was just a guess. Keating testified that it was different for each eye, so when I get the surgery on my right eye, I am going to make a special effort to remember what I see and reproduce it somehow. Keating made an attempt at least.

When I read that Keating had just graduated from SVU, I assumed she must be quite young, which made me wonder why she needed cataract surgery so early in life. But in a video on her website, she explains that she had been a professional artist for decades prior to going back to school, and if you look at her portfolio of work, none of it appears to be narrative (like this zine) and much of it is three-dimensional. So Cataract Sketchbook is an apparently anomalous object in her ouevre. I’m glad she took the time away from her sound experiments and industrial design projects to tell this story. I ordered her book from 50 Watts Books, a fascinating store in Philadelphia. At present, 50 Watts is a purely online shop, but they will be opening a physical bookstore in late October.

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