Threads

Waiting.

I’ve always been that irritating combination of lazy and impatient.
Not good qualities really.
But they are perhaps contextual… I have the patience to make a million tiny stitches, for weeks on end, and the tenacity to see it through. I have the patience to read with a child… to slowly discover the words and the story…
But those types of patience are active.

Waiting is passive…
…and yet again I am reminded by my materials that not everything can happen at once. Now.
Some things need waiting time.

So I’m writing this while I wait for the paint/paper to dry. Actually more paper than paint. I’ve washed most of the paint off. I’m trying for a quieter piece… not so many paint runs, not so much paint. This requires me to leave the dryer on the shelf and the paint and paper and water to do their own thing.

I am a little scared of this “new” body of work that sits away from the textiles I have used for decades. I’ve drawn all my life. But my drawing has always until recently been from life, observation and also a sort of record keeping, ideas communicating sort of drawing either for myself or to show others. It has been “a discipline”. The skills used over those (well over fifty) years are being drawn upon now. And the scary part is that I am drawing from myself… I am drawing from experience. I do feel, actually, that some of the things I am feeling while I draw are being dragged from deep within me, sometimes kicking and screaming. I am facing things down. I am pinning them down. My mind scours itself for these things. It is no wonder that at the end of the day I feel tired and drawn.

But this is why I have put down my needle. It got me to this base camp, but now I need Sherpas.
Textiles gently assured me that all would be well… held me to my comfortable past and let me explore… they took me to a darker place, but they kept me warm. Some surround me in my studio. My helicopter parent textiles.
And they watch while I draw.
I find myself drawing upon the woods near my childhood home. But the gnarled branches that appear are false. They are not real branches. They snag at my clothes and bar my way. I draw upon the ditch of stagnant water, flushed out with each downpour, if it goes on long enough to rise above the level of the lane. Deep in the water are rotting, pungent, sour-smelling things, they suck at my feet and pull at my boots.

I feel that I am now waiting for my mind to catch up with my pencil. There were times in my childhood when I would wander deep into the woods, be engrossed in my thoughts and then miss a landmark tree. Suddenly I would come to, to find I had lost my bearings. A slight rise of bile would panic me… but I knew to stay calm and if I walked in a straight line I would find something familiar, and find my place again.

So this piece of paper is waiting… waiting to dry, while I wait to catch up a little on what I want to draw. I won’t know what that will be until it is dry. The paper leads and I follow, drawing the map as I go. I tie the piece of string to my garden gate, and unwind it as I explore.

I remember reading a Stephen King book… “The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon”… a girl wandering in the woods among the waiting psychological horror. I don’t have any really nasty horror in my own life, thankfully, but others do… and I am prone to wandering in the dark places. While the textiles kept things real, I draw now …. And I have a sense of impending doom, that the drawing might take me somewhere I didn’t want to go… Or I might trip on one of those hidden tangled brambles, and fall…

Maybe I’ll wait a bit longer…

Collaboration can be a thorny issue.

I’ve met many artists who say “Never again!” and I can understand why. It can be a nightmare, and it can be brilliant!

Luckily I had a few brilliant ones under my belt before I hit the real disaster. But there have been a few ordinary “oh well, that didn’t work!” ones too!

Anyway… to support my studios’ ever growing events programme, I signed up to PoArtry. It’s an event invented and managed by poet Rick Sanders and also for this incarnation Simon Meddings, the leader of our General Office pack.

It is a simple concept really: artists who sign up get their names put in one hat, and the poets in another. We are a real motley crew… I was daunted, but thought to myself “They are only words, I can use a single word or title as a starting point if I need to, if I cannot relate to the poems”… So with trepidation and more tension that the FA cup draw (so I’m told) 22 artists were paired with 22 poets. In May there will be an exhibition, of 22 new poems and 22 new art works.

I drew as my partner Leah Atherton

She sent me some poems and I sent her some photos… then we both went WOW! … and arranged to meet in my studio so that she could see the real drawings etc.

We talked simultaneously, and drank tea, exclaiming “YES!” and “ABSOLUTELY!” as we went. We talked about how people have an effect on each other, the glancing blows and the disregarded whispers… we talked of so many things that linked us.

Of all the poems sent, this is the one that made my heart leap instantly into my drawings… into the depths of those touches and strokes… the ambiguous nature of leaving traces, and NOT leaving traces… oh my goodness…

MAYBE A DAY LATER

You follow the rules of Leave No Trace
better than anyone I know.

Determined to prevent damage
there is nothing to show that you were here

But an indentation where you stood;
so many soft footprints on my mind.

(Copyright Leah Atherton)

After about an hour and a half we became almost silent, staring at blank walls… “Time to go… time to think”… said Leah

So this morning I draw, and I write words to remind on my tablecloth…

And so it begins, Leah, I can’t thank you enough for tilting my view just enough to see things differently.

These drawings… on Valentine’s Day … they’re all about love. They’re as much about love as they could possible be.
Some days I forget. Some days I wrangle and wrestle and even slice bits off. But it’s still about love. Love isn’t easy really is it? Not in the real world. Love in the real world contains everything else. All the negative emotion and struggle is balanced and held and trudged and waded through for love. Pain is endured and witnessed through eyes with love. Love holds all of the hope.
Even when you think it is dead, it’s absence is outlined… the chalk line around where it lived marks it.
When I forget that they are about love, they are harder to get right. The minute I try to make them Drawings… I lose them.

I’ve had a couple of days away from the studio. I’ve mucked about with some digital pieces. Digital pieces might look good, but other than that they don’t give back. A digital piece is me watching Jason Statham getting a nice clean white shirt out of the boot of his car.
A drawing with paper and paint and pencil is a lover in my bed.

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

 

It is a very human thing, I think, to think in metaphors and analogies.

That tale of our lives flashing before us as we die, or in near death situations is a way of searching through our files to find something that will work to save us perhaps… to apply the ultimate analogy.

Working abstractly these days, I find I am doing this more and more. The paper, the paint, the pencil… and the application of water, a hairdryer… these elements are analogous… each one holds their part in the story.

The story concerns me. Of course. The work is autobiographical, egotistic. I am trying to figure it out. By using the materials to represent/reflect/explain to myself how I exist in my small world, I seek something. I don’t know that I am consistently pencil…or paper… or paint… or hairdryer. My existence shifts between them all. I could be the paper, absorbing, repelling, taking the wounds the pencil inflicts. Holding everything together under stress? I could be the paint… Causing chaos, staining, making my mark, bleeding all over the place… a bloody mess. I could be that pencil… 6H… carving, making some sort of scarred structure… 6B… soothing… a balm for the ills… calming… stroking… it’ll be ok… or not. The hairdryer is a manipulator… thinking it is in control, but it is not. Something in the paint quality, or a small greasy spot on the paper jerks the blown paint off its predicted path and is sworn at… control is an illusion…all is chaos.

And all of this is, at the same time as helping me, complete bollocks along the same lines as a newspaper horoscope. I have difficulty with the art bollocks phenomenon… it’s one of those things that is complete bollocks right up to the point at which you recognise something that fits with your view. Then of course it is an absolute truth.

The process helps me think about it all, yes… and the results are pleasing… to me at least… and they do suggest to me an organic, metaphorical life… but it is really difficult to explain how this actually feels… what it means…

After my last blog that told of my new year un-resolutions, and sowing seeds for the year, the words of my friend Bo have been ringing in my ears:

“If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans…”

So here I am then, plans already slightly scuppered and delayed by circumstances!

Oh my you should have heard the language. Yeah. The really BAD words.

I was on my way to my friend Michael’s music studio in Kings Heath… I was actually at the last set of traffic lights, stationary, red light… possibly 500 yards from his front door… he probably had already put the kettle on…

BANG! …..some idiot drives into my car.

I’ll not go into detail, because that’s between me, three insurance companies, the police and a breakdown truck… suffice to say, I’m fine, but my car is not. It is not apparently economically feasible to repair it (although for someone it will be… but not me or the insurance company)

Anyway… bye the bye… I have a hire car while someone searches for another one, and all will be paid up without argument with me.

Michael and I have re-arranged a date in the not too distant future, to pick up where we left off.

And in a bid to regain some sort of normality, I’m zooming up and down to the studio (in a very sporty car that I could never afford) to paint and draw and listen.

I laid down some paint on a large sheet off my lovely roll of paper before Christmas, and I had been drawing on it, but wasn’t really very content with it.

I am aware that if left to my own devices I can become a bit “safe and pretty” in my work. It all looks nicely produced, competent… blah blah blah… but boring.

This is why Bo is always a useful ally… because he challenges this in me. He doesn’t let me get away with it. I have become aware over the years though that I now seem to have a little bit of him lodged in my brain, saying “oh yeah?” when it all gets a bit comfortable. I kid myself it is me, but the internal monologue definitely has his voice.

This paper then, being very expensive, needs to earn its keep. I cannot afford to just let it languish under drawing I’m not happy with. The glorious nature of this paper is also though, being very good quality, it will take a pretty good scrub. So this is what I did. I got a sponge, washed it all off. The graphite came away, as it was resting for the most part on the watercolour paint. I swooshed it about and got rid of most of the darker marks, and was left with a ghostly shadow of what went before. Sometimes, when you are unhappy with a piece of work, you have nothing to lose by pushing the destruct button.

The sponge had left marks too… not happy, so took to using the water spray on the wiped marks. …better. Then being left with more puddling, took to my hairdryer, and the resulting tracks of water paint lay over the ghosts… better again.

I went home (zzzoooom)… and let it dry.

I don’t usually describe what I have physically done in such detail, but I wanted to here, as a record for myself, but also to show that my preference for simpler processes can be pushed to its limit. To my limit. I am able to break my own rules.

So this large sheet of watery ghosts has some very interesting patches. And for some reason, I decide to slice up this big sheet into nine. Each piece is now around A3/2ish sized and what I find most interesting now is that the focus of each piece is not conveniently in the middle.

Hmmm…

What I have now are nine pieces that are difficult to work.

Where I want to draw is not in the middle, but is falling off the edge.

This is challenging my inclination to fall into “nice” without thinking about it. I have to think far more carefully about which parts I draw into and which I leave. The sheets are watery and ethereal. The bits I draw are pinned down, so I find I am drawing on them less… just defining an area, a mark or two… and then leaving the ghosts to interact and fade away.

The drawing suggests a somewhere-other… these marks fall off the edges and make something different known.

I like them more, not because they are nice, but because they are suggesting that something isn’t right. That it’s perhaps not nice at all. The drawings are saying “Go on then, make a plan with your paint… see how we laugh…”

Better.