This morning I woke thinking about the kind of space I seem to have been craving around my drawing.
A place where I can turn up as I am.
Where I can draw what I like, with what I like.
Where I can be serious and playful, thoughtful and impulsive, ambitious and tired.
Where growth doesn’t mean becoming a different sort of artist, but giving the artist I already am enough room, attention and company to develop.
My head was full of these thoughts as I drew this morning. I picked up the wrong pocket sketchbook. I gathered whatever materials were around me and started without much of a plan. I changed tools as I went. A little tea spilt onto the page and became part of the drawing.
I rather love today’s wonky messy drawing. I want to make lots more wonky messy drawings.
I was following my current early-morning drawing compulsion of pouring out my tea and reaching for my mirror and sketchbook. It was even earlier than usual — 3.00 am today — and I’d rather have still been sleeping. But the rule seems to be: I wake up, make tea and draw myself. So that’s what I was doing.
When the pencil broke
Midway through drawing, the lead of my pencil broke. I’d been using a rather lovely old and waxy Derwent Drawing pencil in Ivory Black and enjoying the heavy, pastel-like quality of its lines. It was as I was working the pencil hard, drawing the now familiar line of my mouth, that the lead simply crumbled. In that moment, the spell was broken and I was able to stop drawing.
I realised I liked where the drawing had ended and decided to leave it where it was. Switching to a pen, I grounded the drawing in the moment with an early-morning report in the corner.
I think — and this is new — even though the drawing was “unfinished”, being forced to stop meant my compulsion to draw had been quenched and I was able to relax into being awake and drink my tea.
A second drawing
After a little while, I reached for my newly started A4 Fabriano sketchbook and began another drawing, not because I needed to, but because I wanted to. This time I drew slowly, probably for about an hour, stopping regularly to enjoy my tea and notice the sound of the rain on the window above my head.
Something interesting happened with this drawing. The self-portrait was drawn first, with the now-sharpened Derwent, much as I’ve been drawing them these past couple of weeks. But then I switched to my broad-nibbed Kaweco Sport and returned to the very familiar language and materials of my tea-tray drawings. It was as if these two, until now separate ways of drawing, met for the first time.
At 4.20 am I added a few words to ground this drawing too: It’s raining hard. I’m awake and drinking tea and thinking I might just make a second pot.
I haven’t been following the Selfietember prompts very closely, but this morning I was curious to try yesterday’s: Close your eyes and draw yourself.
No mirror needed today, of course, and the drawing became essentially a blind, blind contour drawing.
What interested me most was how familiar parts of my face felt to draw. I almost always begin my self-portraits at the left side of my glasses, then sweep up and around the frames towards my right ear. Even with my eyes closed, that route felt familiar. So did my nose, mouth and chin.
It made me think about how much of my recent self-portrait drawing may now be coming from memory — or perhaps muscle memory…
This morning I drew before making my tea. Early, though not quite as early as has been the case for most of my self-portrait drawings over the last two weeks. Today, because I’d had more sleep, I think my brain was more capable of thought — of piecing together memories and ideas.
I drew with the same growing compulsion that has been present in my recent drawings, but what was missing was the anxiety that has accompanied much of my drawing since I returned to the practice over three years ago.
My mother died in early 2008, in the run-up to my final MA show. As we cleared her house, my brother filled bin bags with papers and bits and pieces — letters, cards, notebooks, shopping lists — things that, to him, looked like rubbish.
After he left, I spent two weeks unpacking them all again.
I remember being particularly drawn to the shopping lists. So many of them contained the same things, repeated from week to week. Ordinary things. Everyday things. But that was exactly what made them feel important.
They were traces of her life.
It didn’t really matter what the marks said. What mattered was that she had made them. Her hand had moved across those scraps of paper. She had thought those thoughts, written those words, lived those ordinary days.
Just making marks
Today, I can see that my drawing has been reaching towards something similar.
Not being concerned with how the marks look together, but rather that they are there. Not waiting for inspiration or the right subject. Just making marks. Making a mark. Saying: I’m here.
Not concerning myself with the why, at least not today, but rather giving in to the compulsion, letting the anxiety fall away, and making a drawing.
Holding on to the thought that perhaps one day I’ll be pleased I did.
At the moment, the act of drawing isn’t a comfort to me; it’s more of a compulsion. However, there are ways that I draw that can add comfort to the act.
Today, I reached for one of my familiar homemade pocket sketchbooks and drew with an old and rather weather-beaten Blackwing 3.
As autopilot took over and I began to draw the face in the mirror, there was a definite sense of “ahh” that softened the usual anxiety around making the first marks on the page.
