The drawings that trouble me
Lately, I’ve been thinking about the drawings that make me uncomfortable, embarrass me — the ones I’d like to rip out of my sketchbook and forget.
This week there have been two of them (so far!): A Few Ragged Lines, drawn in the museum café just after my dental appointment, and A New Addition to My Tray, made from bed this morning.
In the café, I managed only a few hesitant marks before realising how shaky I was. The drawing stopped almost as soon as it began. Today, a few days later, I added the text and then began A New Addition to My Tray — my first attempt at drawing since that trip to the dentist. I realised quickly that I was still dealing with anxiety. The text on A Few Ragged Lines is ragged and uncertain — I corrected myself more than once — and in A New Addition to My Tray I kept reworking the small brown pharmacy bag. The more I drew, the more uneasy I felt.
On embarrassment and honesty
There’s a particular kind of embarrassment that comes with this — when a drawing feels raw, clumsy, too revealing. Some of that embarrassment is about what the drawing might expose, but more immediately it’s about how it looks: awkward, unresolved, unskilled. It’s the discomfort of seeing something I’ve made that doesn’t live up to how I wanted it to be. For a while I often can’t bear to open my sketchbook and look at what I’ve made.
After a few days (sometimes hours), those feelings can shift. With A Few Ragged Lines, that has happened — I have begun to see the original lines that I made on Thursday, not as failures, but as traces of persistence, an honest snapshot of a difficult moment in my life. The trembling, the awkwardness, the unresolved forms: they all speak of the effort to keep going, even when calm attention won’t quite come. Maybe, in time, I’ll be able to see today’s drawing in a similar light…
Preserving the work as it is
Part of my practice now is to preserve and reveal my sketchbooks exactly as they are. Once I add the date to a drawing, it’s finished — a small record of that moment, however incomplete or uneasy it feels. I want to resist the temptation to tidy, edit, or hide these pages. I want them to remain a true reflection of the moment that they were made, however that feels and whatever they reveal.
I’ve been thinking about whether adding text to A Few Ragged Lines days later sits outside my usual way of working. Because the text was written on the opposite page and dated separately, it still feels fitting somehow. Perhaps it simply reflects how the drawing continued to work on me for a few days before I could meet it again. It’s something to keep in mind for future pages.
The practice of staying
Embarrassment, I realise, is often just the shock of honesty — the moment when a drawing shows something we didn’t mean to reveal, whether that’s in its awkward form or in the feelings it carries. It’s uncomfortable, but it’s also what makes the work alive. Those uneven marks and half-resolved shapes tell the truth of how things were: the body still unsettled, the hand trying to steady itself, the mind circling back to breath.
I’m realising that these uneasy drawings belong to the practice just as much as the easy ones do. Maybe they are the practice — the record of staying with myself, however briefly, in a moment I’d rather have avoided.
