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Viewing single post of blog Drawing Journal

I spent the weekend drawing. Writing had absorbed me all week and I needed to throw myself back into it. And, I had the delivery of some new dip pen holders and nibs and a lovely fat bamboo pen. It took me back. A friend had fashioned one for me, oh, it must’ve been twenty or even thirty years ago and I’d forgotten what a joy they are to not only hold but make marks with. You cannot pussy-foot with tentative lines when you’ve one of those in your hand.

We try to get to the coffee shop when it first opens. (I say we, for my partner accompanies me for moral support and company, and he buys the drinks.) I like to see the ‘opening process’, that slow influx of regulars (whom I don’t know by name and don’t want to, preferring to keep that slight distance) who check to see that their favourite seat is free before ordering their ‘usual’. The conviviality and sense of temporary belonging is very seductive. And when I’m not there, like now, I miss it. It is freezing though (the open door policy becomes rather uncomfortable as winter looms) and we all keep our coats on. The elderly gentleman who reads from his phone encased in a turquoise wallet is one of the first in and is soon joined by his skeletal friend wearing a huge baseball hat.

I draw them over and over for about an hour. I love their faces. And watching the progress of their chat. The thin one barely moves (he looks like he might snap) but clearly makes lugubrious comments that makes his more robust friend throw himself back in his chair with laughter. He moves a lot, hence my constant drawing of him.

I never tire of trying to capture their faces. I prefer ones that lived in, experience wrought by life.

The younger man with a beard with grey strands in it, and who generally wears a mauve hat with ear muffs, was in first but having made conversation with him the week before (I’d asked him if he was wearing patchouli oil) I felt uncomfortable fixing my gaze on him.

The first few hours were taken up mostly with a flurry of people rushing in for take-aways. The fair was still on, perhaps they were going there, or maybe, more banally just off to work. Later a man sat at the table just across from us with a young girl. Was it his daughter? She stood up at some point and mimicked somebody and he laughed. She left and he was joined, seemingly unplanned, by an acquaintance. I drew him over and over.

He had a look of Alan Titchmarsh, a gentle, kindly face but off-set with a strangely dramatic hair cut which involved the shaving away of much of his locks around his ears (rather like they shave the midribs of horses to help them sweat, I think). It frankly fascinated me. But I couldn’t get his features right. Then two men occupied the table to our left. One was a mountain of man and the other rather small and wiry.

I picked up tiny snippets of their conversation. They were talking about a journey and a shortcut. I knew the place they talked off and longed to interject when the smaller one couldn’t remember the name of the place. He wore a bright red sweat top. Ah, some colour I thought, finally. I do tend to favour line and black and white. Colour is generally an afterthought, there being too much to capture in so short a time. And it’s funny his finely, chiselled features were inappropriate for my lovely bamboo pen.

The regular, the small-statured man (who drinks 4 or 5 coffees in one sitting) with low, slung too-big-for-him jeans was in as usual for I could see him on the table behind the man with AT’s face. He seemed to be to sitting with an older man. His father perhaps? They didn’t appear to talk much, the younger man staring down at the table or looking at his phone. He looks sad. He has Eeyore like features that only seem to brighten up when he talks to the barista girls behind the counter. And then, just after I’d constructed a narrative about him and his ‘father’ not being on good terms they both let out huge guffaws over something the ‘son’ had said.

When he left him alone to order more coffees his father’s face fell. So many people whom I observe look sad when solitary. Is it our human condition to be so? Sunday was inevitably quieter.

The same middle-aged man with his phone, though no one joined him that morning. And a curious woman, all wrapped up in duvet coat, who came in for a take-away with her dog. The dog stared at me the whole time I was drawing – or did I imagine it?

There was a family of two little boys, a mother and a grandmother who occupied the big table by the door. I rushed to try and capture the mother.

She seemed oblivious to the fact that her boys had scurried off (in search of the wax crayons and colouring sheet the coffee shop have on a little shelf round the corner I later realised) dropping their coats on the floor. Their grandmother (I presumed this was her relationship) kept nodding off.

Her head on her hand. And then the ‘wild’ swimmers came in.

Though one not so wild, as she lifted up her skirt to reveal wet-suit shorts. A lack-lustre drawing session, sometimes I can’t find the energy.

And then there was a final flurry before we left. Two men, clearly partners came in, and I managed to get one of them. His friend kept staring over at me, evidently interested in what I was doing. He inched closer but didn’t pluck up the courage to say anything. He had a marvellous head of hair, perfectly formed in luscious blonde quiff, like something out of the 50s. And his coat was just right too, corduroy with a fur collar. My final drawing was of a young lad. The bamboo pen making the marks of his curly top and a finer nib suggesting with elegant succinctness the rest of his coatless form. Pulling myself away is hard, particularly as I see more and more faces and bodies filling those rooms that I long to draw. Is this becoming something like an obsession?


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