One of the difficulties in a multipurpose workshop concerns the buffeting clutter of different things. Out for a ride, back to my workshop, rush in with bike and cycling gear, brush up against drawing, damage it – hours of work irrevocably changed. Things can be too precious; I’ll try to fix it. It won’t be quite what I intended. But I now realise that I didn’t know quite what I intended until I had stopped working on it. In fact I didn’t intend anything other than to be there and to do that. Do I do this stuff in order to find out what are my intentions, or rather, were, my intentions? Seems a little odd really, a kind of walking backward through life, travelling in reverse, discovering only what was. Each moment unfolds initially in a place that is not known, until it is left behind; the journey takes place within the dynamics of waiting.My stuff tends to look like my stuff. My errors, accidents and mistakes similarly have a consistency of style about them. They are not ‘not me’. My brain often fails to pay attention to the job in hand. It goes off somewhere else leaving my hands without guidance. Spilling, damaging, dropping, forgetting, are central to my signature. What to do? Name the accident? ‘Drawing Damaged by a Cycling Helmet?’ Not really. ‘I’ damaged it with a cycling helmet. Can the thing retain some validity by incorporating the damage into itself? Or does it remain ‘spoiled’. That’s what a people do. Has the drawing learned anything from the experience, have I? We two appear to have some common characteristics; we stand for each other. Or is it that I just don’t want to waste the effort? Or is it too late? Draw it again? Can’t be done. I imagine two drawings on a wall. The first is ‘Pigeon and Clouds’. Next to it, ‘Drawing Damaged by a Man with a Cycling Helmet.’
What can be said? It is a drawing. An image of a bird, above it tonal cloud-shapes,no horizon. The bird is linear. Form is implicit in the way in which the line works? The rest of the drawing is tonal. Shading suggests clouds. Two techniques? The lines of the bird are abstracted from observations. So too are the clouds, but the directions of flow, as it were, seem opposed. Line, taken from the bird, creates distance, bird as vehicle for something other? Tone is placed into the cloud, descriptive? Is that so? In the writing that is how it beginds to feel. Both drawing and writing are a bridging of gaps between things whose reality is uncertain. Gap between object and image. Gap between maker and made. Gap between material and faith. Gap between what is and what might be the case. Bridges in the air.
What can be asked? How has this happened? Sensory and sensual, I did this. Fumbled and stroked my way from nothing to something, from not knowing what I was doing to seeing what I had done. I was the bridge, built from the centre to the ends, hanging precarious in the air. An illusion? Like the bird and the clouds?
A little boy in school uniform stands so still under the pine tree, staring down. A pigeon lay dead on its back. I stop and look with him. “Birds die quickly.” he says, “My birds at home die quickly. So do chickens.” I tell him that I draw dead birds and that had I something to put the pigeon in, I would take it home. He says that had he a bag he would give it to me, “It died with its eyes open.” As I am nearly home, I decide to take it with me. I pick it up. The little boy goes on his way.
The pigeon and I might have crossed paths previously. Perhaps it visited my garden, wandered about on the grass observing me as I looked out, flew above my house. I wonder about its last flight, what it saw, how it felt, and what a bird can know. I think of it in the tree above me as I walk to the shop for my paper. Perhaps at the moment that I hand over my Guardian token, the pigeon falls to the path below.Now its body lies in my room. The magenta-pink of its breast forms a soft swelling shape. I have felt for same days a need to draw. Now I am the little boy.
