Of course, as soon as I say “it’s hard to look forward at the moment”, something happens to make me leap forward!
Working at home when you are used to working in a studio is tricky. I have struggled to find alone time/space with two other adults in the house. But usually, as long as I remember to Make an Announcement they leave me alone, mostly.
(*remembers… makes announcement)
Singing time is worse than drawing/making, as it intrudes more… so I haven’t really done any. My voice feels rusty when I try.
Anyway…
It’s happened before, this feeling, and it’s a good feeling. I’ve been drawing drawing drawing. The forms and lines are slowly morphing, that’s good, because I can get stuck on rails sometimes and feel that I’m repeating, but getting nowhere. The gentle morphing is good. I’ve been working in a larger sketchbook, A3, rather than my handbaggable A5. So I’ve been using left over paint on “future pages” and drawing over it when I get there… I look back through these sketchbooks (I’m on the third) and there’s a backwards stepping and a gentle moving forwards, and a backwards stepping again. It’s actually quite rhythmic.
I ordered some imperial size sheets of heavier watercolour paper (425gsm Bockingford, for those paper geeks among you, instead of my usual 10m roll of 300gsm). These are easier to handle at home. And as often happens, a change in materials, however slight, does make for a change in the work. I have found I am making works in series. It almost feels like a series of life drawings of the same model, in the same pose, from different angles. Once I realised this I wanted to do something that drew them together somehow, back-building the model from the drawings I’d made. So just yesterday I started drawing with wire. My first efforts have been in garden wire, because, thanks to lockdown, that’s what I’ve got. What these first 3D sketches have done, is they have enabled me to figure out the vocabulary, and a structure.
I hung the wire in front of the drawings, similar forms, pulled out from the flat wall. The sunlight hit them, the shadows fell.
Suddenly I was able to see it all in a gallery space… these drawings on paper, and in wire, connected from one place to another…
So now all I have to do is the work.
