I unexpectedly find myself in deep-dive.
I have that itchy feeling in my fingers and my brain is running wild and I’m finding it hard to switch off.
Real life interferes with my train of thought and it would be easy to resent that. I’m obsessed with my latest drawing. The mutation I wrote about in the previous post is continuing. Another injection of a new material, in this case charcoal, and I’m riveted and finding it hard to leave the studio. Now charcoal isn’t a thing I usually go for. It’s not clean enough… but I wanted a particular depth of black, and I wanted to be able to work into it and over it. So I put it down where I needed it to be, immobilised it with layers of fixative, washed my hands and carried on working. What I get from that dull, dense, deep blackness is the ability to polish over some of it with the sheen of the graphite. I’m also able to press into the blackness and pick up the texture with the silveriness… delicious.
But because it’s a new way of going about things, I’m unsure of composition, and transitions from one way of working to another… how do I work across from that to the embossed areas of the paper?
This is where the excitement lies, because it’s on a knife edge. I do these things instinctively but I have to concentrate or it could all go tits up at any moment!
All of these ways of being cycle around… this period of mystery, after a period of repetition and practice, turns into a magical period of mastery, where I feel on top of the world and in control… and then undoubtedly after I while I will become bored and feel I’m no longer getting anything accomplished. Then the whole thing starts again, and for ages it will seem like every drawing I do is rubbish. These are the days when it’s easy to leave the studio to get on with the rest of my life. So some sort of balance is there if I wait long enough, but it’s not the sort of balance that’s easy to plan around!
