Drawing from life 2016
Drawing from life, an unconscious reaction to form – written in the life room today 13th June 2016
Like a race horse needs oats, I need drawing to put a light in my belly. But it’s also calming, it narrows the options on the day, straightens the path.
To start the week with drawing signposts me in the right direction, it tells me that the accounts can wait and puts back in the cupboard all the things that tend to spill out take over, it quietens a discombobulated mind.
Just as the air becomes too stuffy, too hot to think, drawing is like rain. It cleans and it nourishes.
Representational, reactional drawing, you have to approach with respect, you can’t fake it, you can’t be clever. Humility in learning is the correct approach. It brings you back down to reality and of course, it makes you see everyone is beautiful. The wobbly bits are life’s adventures, the stains on the flesh are years of summers. Youth’s lean smooth forms have an attraction but history has layers and stories.
After the excitement of my London solo show, the work and the drama of it all, today I return to the life class and it feels like magic. But then of course it is not. That time in front of the model, that 1 minute or 5 minutes of drawing is a reaction in time, never to be repeated. Hand to eye, that look, that seeing, just then, captured on the paper.
Magic.
But of course it’s not, it’s better than magic, its craft. It’s learnt, it’s practiced. And like magician’s hands, it’s quick in execution because of thirty years of practice, thirty years of interest, thirty years of craft, graft, in front of life.
….and then just as that vanity talk rises in my head I ruin a drawing with flippant arrogance, punished, I get back down again. But I smile with the joy of it.
