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.
On the face of it, this little piece of digital ephemera shouldn’t matter. It’s simply an order for two Moleskine sketchbooks made two and a half years ago. But it’s much more than that…
Firstly, these two sketchbooks were the first I bought after returning to drawing following a ten-year break.
Secondly, the date of the invoice shows that they were bought on the same day I heard that my friend Mary Gordon had died.
Mary dying was the catalyst for my restarting to draw. I remember clearly that when I heard she’d died, I knew — suddenly and without doubt — that I needed to draw again. That I didn’t want to die without at least trying to get back to a drawing practice.
What I didn’t remember was just how closely these two events — hearing of her death, and ordering sketchbooks — sat together. According to the invoice, they were not just related, but simultaneous. The sketchbooks were bought on the same day.
That realisation has given this little digital record a much greater significance — it has become a timestamp that shows not just when I returned to drawing, but why.
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.
