I’m sat in yet another hospital waiting room. This time rather less acutely stressful than the last. I find myself pondering the way that I consider my work…. Again… Am I boring you? Sorry.
It is the way I make sense of what is happening around me. “But what about the accountants?” I ask myself… “What does the plumber do to make sense of it all?”
Well they count and they plumb of course. We all find the sense in what we understand best. Plumbing and accountancy are as good a means of sense-making as art. Some would say better. How the money flows and how the water flows probably both give you a sense of how much of the world you feel you can control – or not. Both are useful.
All of these ways of thinking are precisely that. The depth is what is important (to me). Analogy and metaphor are aids to thinking. The application of analogy is a very human trait.
My drawings (in my head, I don’t know how they are received in viewers’ heads) are representative of the emotional turmoil (or not) and so on. What I draw and how I draw are, to me at least, directly related to what I feel… Tightness and release… Stress and relief… A gritting of teeth and a sigh… An in and an out.
I’m not blind to how sensual and/or sexual some of the elements of the drawings can appear. One of the most recent drawings gained its unofficial title “Decidedly Knobby” only after it was finished and pinned to the wall. It would seem I am becoming slightly fixated on the vaginal too. Menopausal woman and all that it encompasses… All about me isn’t it? Well… Yes and no…
It’s a filtration system. I’m absorbing and then processing and the drawings are the by-product that gets spat out at the end. A by-product, but also the MOST important thing. The elephant in the room that’s only seen in a certain light, in the negative spaces, when you screw up your eyes and squint in the corner of the mirror. THERE it is. The Thing. I feel I’m sneaking up on it. Then one day I shall look The Thing in the eye, we will know each other and nod.
That, I romantically hypothesise, will be death. How glorious it would be to meet death as a final satisfaction, rather than a cutting short?!
