I’ve been writing a lot in my sketch book lately, but not necessarily the sort of writing fora public consumption. Don’t get excited… that’s mostly because it’s boring.
As part of the preparatory work for the Study Days and Course I am delivering with Sarah Goudie I am trying to get myself “match fit” if you like to call it that… I can’t think of another phrase that puts it so succinctly!
So I am exploring through my writing the whys and wherefores of drawing from my own personal perspective. I have hung the drawings up in our studio’s ever improving gallery space (keep an eye out, exhibition soon!). And then I look and try to cast my mind back to where these strange and mythical beasts have come from. I’m calling them strange and mythical beasts, but they’re really not.
These drawings have grown from me and my life as naturally as a buddleia on the roof of a derelict pub. They are the portraits of long lost interactions with long lost lives and experiences. They are as familiar to me as my children. But, like my grown up children they still have the power to surprise me (Panama? Really? When? WHEN???!!!??)
So the content of the writing is not interesting to anyone but me, and of course some of it is deeply personal, as it should be when digging deep, but the reasons for doing it are ok to put out there…here…
It is important for me when asking others to dig deep and find out about their own creativity and where it might live, to know what happens when you do that. when I do that… Sarah and I have experience of these activities, and digging deep can be exposing, it can make one feel vulnerable for a while… it can reveal things to oneself that a part of the brain has kept hidden, probably for good reason. These study days can have a profound effect sometimes. Sometimes that happens on the day, sometimes a few months later. What I have found through doing it myself is that we are never really that far from ourselves. I don’t want this to sound like some ageing hippy nonsense, because I am not that sort of person. But I am the sort of person that likes my interactions to be real… whether that is with other people, or with myself.
