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.’
