I made a drawing this morning hoping for a little comfort. I drew the objects I know: mug, teapot, oat milk, tray. Familiar companions to steady anxious hands.
As I worked, I found myself thinking about “firm ground” — the feeling of being steadied by something reliable. I’d hoped the drawing might give me that today. But as the lines unfolded, I realised that hunting for ground might be what pulls me off balance in the first place.
Maybe there isn’t firm ground in the way I keep wanting it. Maybe drawing is simply a way of staying with that uncertainty for a few minutes at a time — accepting the unsteady surface, line by line, rather than trying to find something solid underneath.
A note to self: perhaps comfort can come from letting go of the search.
This feels like an important drawing — the first I’d made in nearly ten years after suddenly stopping drawing in 2013. It’s of my dear friend Mary, who had just died.
Hearing the news — and knowing I needed to draw
In my grief after hearing she had died, I was sent into quite a spin about my own mortality, and I realised with a sudden shock that I didn’t want to die myself without drawing again. I went into town looking for the familiar — the pocket-sized Moleskine sketchbook I used to draw in many years ago — but I couldn’t find one.
I ended up ordering one from Amazon that same afternoon.
The invoice — and what it showed me later
I’ve just found the invoice — dated 10th March 2023 — the very day I received the message telling me she’d gone. That was how urgent getting hold of that familiar sketchbook, and making a drawing in it, must have felt.
According to the invoice, it arrived the next day — so this drawing could have been made on or around the 11th of March 2023.
Why upside down?
It is an upside-down drawing, following an exercise from Betty Edwards’ excellent Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. The exercise — turning a photograph upside down to draw from, so the brain is tricked into really looking at what’s there — felt like a gentle way back into drawing after so many years.
Looking back, I think I also needed Mary herself to be upside down so I wasn’t looking directly at my lovely, now dead, friend. That slight detachment helped me see only shapes and lines, rather than the full weight of grief.
A drawing that felt like me
Unlike most of the rest of that sketchbook, this drawing looks more like the drawings I’m making today (and the ones I was making back in 2013). The marks feel very me — in their quickness and weight. Most of the other drawings feel nervous and uncertain. This one, though — this one feels like me finding myself again.
Why it mattered — then and now
The drawing mattered then because it was proof that I could still make a line. That drawing itself was something I hadn’t lost — not completely. It mattered because it was a beginning — or maybe more accurately, a returning — even though I didn’t, or couldn’t, trust that at the time.
It matters today because I can see what I couldn’t quite see then: this drawing quietly held both loss and return. It was an opening — quiet, unannounced, and upside down. A small act of mark-making that allowed all the others to follow.
This morning I woke with a tightness around the idea of making my morning drawing — a physical resistance to picking up my sketchbook. I’ve been working backwards through this sketchbook, so although I’d reached what was, for me, the final blank spread, it was also the first pair of pages after opening the cover. I’d been feeling it coming for days and, unusually, it had been haunting me.
I’ve been working this way through sketchbooks for more than two and a half years — since I first returned to drawing after Mary Gordon died. It was a strategy born out of needing to avoid the paralysing pressure of a perfect first page. At first I simply chose random places to draw, but soon I settled into working from back to front. It has served me well, but with this sketchbook that first-page paralysis has reared its head again — maybe because of the recent stress around my health and all the newness.
Interestingly, in worrying about meeting this page, I’d forgotten about the power of routine. Simply making my tea, arranging my tea-things on the tray, and bringing it back to bed found me reaching for my sketchbook and pencil and beginning to draw. I stayed gentle and started with something small and contained: the Stanley logo on my insulated mug. I’ve been wanting to draw it for a while, and its sparseness felt like the right entry point. Once that was on the page, the drawing grew easily — the reading light, the illustrated hen mat, the milk jug. Familiar shapes. Familiar company.
I decided not to add any colour, and as I dated the drawing to mark it as finished, I felt a quiet satisfaction at having made it through that moment of resistance — and at having filled another sketchbook, one drawing at a time, from back to front.
Back to the much more familiar this morning — drawing with the light on and drawing my Go Gently Louise mug on my Moomin tray.
I was awake VERY early this morning (about 2.00 am) and couldn’t go back to sleep, so decided to make myself a mug of tea.
I need everything to feel as familiar as possible at that time in the morning and so, as I boiled the kettle was picturing my routine of taking my tea back to bed, reaching into my drawing bag and pulling out my sketchbook and Lochby pouch containing my very stubby Blackwing 3 stub and settling down to draw.
In that mental picture I saw not my new orange insulate mug on my tea tray, but rather my friendly old Louise Go Gently mug. Likewise, my tray wasn’t the large chicken one with the new tray mat on it, but my comforting Moomin tray.
These choices would dictate what I would draw this morning. Familiarity stacked on top of familiarity. Lovely!
The text in the drawing reads:
As much as I like my new insulated mug, I realise that I’ve been missing my Louise Go Gently mug. So I’m risking cold tea and having it on my tray again this morning.
Today I turned my new tea-tray mat over, revealing a calm brown background. I also added a Mr Kipling apple pie to my tray — something with warm associations from long ago. Together these two small changes helped me into a calmer space before I started drawing than I was in yesterday.
I began the drawing with the spout of my milk jug. I get pleasure and comfort from drawing its shape — the same is true of my teapot spout. After drawing both, I moved on to my new insulated mug, starting with the little sticking-out piece of its lid. I can see that this might become a familiar starting point — it isn’t yet, but the possibility that it might pleases me.
I made the decision to include the chickens on the tray mat — more unfamiliarity — but then I spotted a chicken that was familiar. It is the same as the one on my lesser-used (but still often drawn) Go Gently George mug. Seeing that one helped the other illustrated chickens feel friendlier. I was getting to know them better as I drew. Quite suddenly, I realised I was enjoying myself, and noticed that the new mug is more on the page and part of the drawing than it was yesterday.
No colour today, no text. I rather like the open space left on the page.
A calmer time drawing — and, with the new insulated mug, my tea was still hot when I finished.
