Kleksography

Kleksography.Die Kleksographie.

Many a reader, reading and looking at these pages, may well be reminded how even in earliest youth, by crushing small berries that stain, or even the heads of flies and so on, on folded paper, he saw drawings come forth without art, without the help of pencil or brush. I too still remember this from my youth.

The increase of my half-blindness was the reason that I took this youthful game further; for because of it, when I wrote, drops of ink very often fell on the paper. Sometimes I did not notice them and folded the paper without drying them. When I then pulled it apart again, I saw, especially when these drops had come near a fold of the paper, how symmetrical drawings had sometimes formed, notably arabesques, pictures of animals and of people, and so on. This gave me the idea of bringing this phenomenon, by practice, to somewhat greater development.

The procedure, and the pictures that came of it, I shared seven years ago with many of my friends near and far; they were also very often asked for in the albums of lady friends, with an explanation in a verse written in my hand, and at lotteries in Stuttgart and Dresden, held by charitable women for the benefit of the poor, they were gladly taken as prizes.

This game with the thick blots also spread quickly among many at that time, and for a while, in our district and far off too, it became almost a fashionable game for old and young, even in schools, often to the great distress of the teachers. A lover of this art in Stuttgart has even, I hear, had such ink pictures reproduced by lithography.

Seven years ago a witty friend of art and of humour gave this way of making pictures out of ink blots the name of kleksography. The pictures given in these pages also came about in no other way. I will only repeat here somewhat more fully how such pictures come about, and how these too came about.

Ink blots (in Swabian, Tintensäue, ink-sows), made on one side of the fold of a folded paper (on its right or its left side, but never on both), yield (after one has laid the paper over them and then stroked it with the ball of the hand or a finger), by virtue of their doubling, which they acquire by running and by printing onto the clean space on the other side of the line, figures of the most various kinds, which leave room for fantasy. It is remarkable that these very often bear the type of long-past ages, from the childhood of ancient peoples, for example idols, urns, mummies and so on. The human figure, like the animal figure, emerges from these blots in the most various shapes, and especially, very often, the skeleton of man. Where fantasy does not suffice, one can sometimes help with a few strokes of the pen, since the main type is mostly given. Thus, for example, a human figure can come out in its whole form and clothing, yet perhaps without a head, a hand and so on, where, as has also happened in what follows, here and there what is missing is easily supplied.

It must be noted that one can never produce what one would like to, and that often the opposite of what one expected comes about.

So these so-called Hades pictures given here did not come forth by my will and by my power either (I am wholly incapable of the art of drawing); they came to light in the way described above, through ink blots alone, and then often needed no help at all, often only insignificant help from a few strokes of the pen, or from an artificial drawing-in of faces.

I must also note that these pictures were naturally not made after the text, but that the text was made after them; and so may the reader and beholder of these pages receive them and their explanation in verse with indulgence.

In February ‘57.

Justinus Kerner.