Michael Nobbs

Tag: MaryGordon

  • A trace of Mary on her birthday

    Screenshot of an entry from Mary Gordon’s blog, Fat Black Cat Journal, showing a post titled “Lady of leisure,” dated 18 September 2022. At the top is a painting of a woman in a dark coat and hat standing beside a war memorial. Below, Mary writes about identifying with the woman in the painting and reflects on exhaustion, disappointment and trying to keep going.

    Today would have been Mary Gordon’s birthday. I’ve been particularly missing her of late, especially when I spoon coffee into my little stovetop espresso maker, a ritual we both enjoyed.

    A couple of weeks ago, I discovered that her blog, Fat Black Cat Journal, is still online, and I feel as though I’ve found a way to reconnect with her — with traces of her.

    It hasn’t always been easy to read. This entry, written a few days after her final birthday, feels particularly painful and, as has been the case numerous times in recent days when I’ve been encountering these traces of her online, I’ve wanted to reach back in time and give her a hug.

    Sometimes things happen and you realise that you have been putting one foot in front of another and trying to keep going. This has been happening for YEARS. Everything from prepandemic to now has been grim, foot infront of another with no relief. Just another fucking thing to deal with. My joi de vivre fucked off many years ago. I’m now in emergency mode all I want to do is slowly crochet the same piece of yarn over and over again and listen to some semi decent drama on the radio and work out a way of keeping warm. And I don’t want to talk to anyone either I cannot bear the thought of how my life has just been a series of disappointments, and failures, many of which were not my fault but I have to live with them all the same. Last night I could hardly bear it I watched an Italian film whose central character was a smug leftist filmmaker. A smug leftist film maker scuppered my film career many years ago. And I remembered the three months of my life when I woke up and cried every day.

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  • Drawing Mary (upside down)

    A laptop resting on a crocheted blanket, showing an upside-down photograph of a woman outdoors, against a stone wall, wearing a striped jumper in bright colours. In front, a small open sketchbook lies on the keyboard, displaying a loose line drawing of the same face. A pencil rests nearby.

    A beginning — or a returning

    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.

    See also: Finding out that Mary Gordon had died and Moleskine Invoice

    A small open sketchbook lies on the keyboard of a laptop. On the laptop screen, an upside-down photograph shows part of a woman’s forehead and hair. The sketchbook page contains a loose line drawing of a face, with bold outlines defining the eyes, mouth, and clothing folds. The surrounding area is softly lit and uncluttered.

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  • Finding out that Mary Gordon had died

    A screenshot of an email message displayed on a laptop screen. The message was sent via the Go Gently website contact form and appears in a plain black-on-white layout. The sender’s name, email address, and phone number are partially visible but have been redacted with blurred or blanked areas. The subject line references Mary by name. The body of the message explains that Mary had died in a hospice in Edinburgh a few days earlier, describes how sudden her illness had been, and expresses sadness and disbelief. At the top of the screen are standard email interface icons, including reply, forward, archive, and search. Below the message, a visible timestamp shows the date and time the message was received. The rest of the laptop screen is dimly visible around the email window.

    From March 2023, this screenshot shows the message sent via my Go Gently website, informing me that my dear friend Mary had died a few days earlier.

    See also: Moleskine Invoice and Drawing Mary (upside down).

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  • Moleskine Invoice

    A screenshot of a digital invoice dated 10 March 2023. The page lists two sketchbooks — a Moleskine Sketchbook and a Moleskine Pocket Sketchbook — with item codes, prices, VAT, and delivery details. The document layout is plain and administrative, with black text on a white background, order number and billing address at the top, and confirmation of next-day delivery at the bottom.

    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.

    See also: Finding out that Mary had Died and Drawing Mary (upside down)

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  • Dealing With Last Page / First Page Anxiety

    A view of a tea tray arranged on a bed covered with a crocheted blanket. On the tray is a patterned hen tray mat, and resting on the mat are a white milk jug, an orange insulated mug, a tall stainless-steel flask, a lime-green teapot, and a slim reading light rising just behind them. In front of the tray lies an open sketchbook. **On its left page is a dense pencil drawing of some of the items from the tray — the reading light and the milk jug — shown sitting on the hen-patterned mat.** On its right page, centred within a large area of blank paper, is a small hand-drawn version of the Stanley logo — a winged bear wearing a crown — with “STANLEY. Since 1913” written beneath it. Warm lamplight falls across the scene.

    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.

    A close-up view of an open sketchbook resting on a bed. On the left page is a dense line drawing made with pencil showing a reading light and a milk jug, both sitting on a patterned hen tray mat. The hens form a repeating background across the whole page. On the right page, centred within a large area of blank paper, is a small hand-drawn version of the Stanley logo — a winged bear wearing a crown — with “STANLEY. Since 1913” written beneath it. The date “17–11–25” appears in the lower corner. Above the sketchbook the edges of the tray from the drawing can be seen showing the base of the reading lamp and part of the hen patterned tray mat from the drawing, along with a short pencil with a gold point guard and what looks like the base of an orange mug and a silver flask. Warm lamplight softens the edges of the paper.

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