Very tired this morning and could hardly face myself, but habits can be like being on auto-pilot and, as soon as I poured out my tea, I reached for my mirrors, sketchbook and pen.
The only place I had to draw to hand was the back cover of my recently filled little homemade pocket sketchbook, so this was a smaller attempt at seeing myself, made with an 05 Pigma Micron — a recent gift from a friend and a pen I haven’t drawn with since I restarted drawing, and possibly not for twenty years.
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I woke up from a dream about a friend from long ago, which sent me off (before I’d even made my tea!) in search of traces of my MA from almost 20 years ago. I found an old Flickr account that, amazingly, is still active — and for which I still have the login details.
Inside was an album of photographs taken by another friend, now dead, of my final show. There was more drawing there than I remember.
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I seem to be awake at 4.00 am a lot at the moment and have decided, for now, to just go with the flow and draw myself.
The complete video, in which I leaf through David Hockney’s book Faces 1966–1984, is available over on my Patreon.
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It’s been quite a while since I last wrote here. I think gaps can say almost as much as what’s actually said, so I’m not going to try to catch up, but rather begin again from where I am today.
I’m drawing self-portraits at the moment—joining in with #Selfietember. I’ve bought myself a mirror and have been eyeballing myself in the wee small hours when I haven’t been able to sleep.
Today felt intimate and uncomfortable. I was very tired, but couldn’t sleep. Wired. I enjoyed making the few marks that made up this drawing.
Oh, and I’m drawing with a pen these days. My pencil seems to have found its way back into its pencil case—for now, at least.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
See also: Finding out that Mary Gordon had died and Moleskine Invoice
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