Diary of an Art Historian

(This is part two of a story I wrote that I’m sharing with you here… The post below this one contains part one)

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The birthday group assembled on the floor, balancing pink fizz in glasses on their knees. Mark had brought a cake with white layers of icing. She switched off the standard lamp as the white candles were lit one by one, a slow count to thirty. Her room and her friends and her own hands, sleeves and skirt turned black and white and grey. The spaces behind them grew full, then flat, and then full again with shadows that ballooned and burst. Layers of paper lay heavy as law and dainty as icing sugar by turns.

‘I won’t blow them out yet.’

They waited, humouring her.

‘Here. I shall serve each of you.’

She pulled herself off the floor and her shadow slid up the wall. She pushed the small stack of plates behind her and shifted over, kneeling above the iced cake. Facing them, she made two swift cuts and wiped a smear of wax off the knife with her cuff,

‘James, this is for you, don’t burn yourself,’ handing him the first slice.

She cut another seven large pieces until each guest cupped a share of the sugary lamp in their fingers. Melting candlewax and butter icing smelled old fashioned, rich and serious.

Thirty inch-high sources of light illuminated eight faces, making their foreheads dark and their lips light. The drawings behind them were made dark grey as each held three or four flames protectively near their own body. She kissed each of her friends on the cheek as the flames burned low.

Katy’s voice began softly,

‘Happy Birthday to You…’

They sang until the room was entirely dark and their hands decorated with cold rivulets of wax, white lines tracing the contours of their knuckles. Then the crumbly business of eating without plates, scattering the floor with blossomy chunks of cake, clinking of glasses, shifting of limbs and slowly rising voices as the lamp was switched back on.

She was still smiling, on a carpet island inhabited for one night by good friends. All these tense emotions contained in the finest pencil lines, the boundaries of flowers, an ox-bow lake almost hemming them in. She sat quietly, let Mark and the rest talk and make jokes as they went back and forth from the kitchen, fetching things left to cool in the fridge, opening a window to smoke under. They took care with her drawings, sometimes stopping to look at one, studying it the way you can study a human face, the face of someone you care about. Slowly her friends left with bear hugs at the door.

On her own again, certain of the drawings seemed different. Perhaps those that had been looked at the longest; definitely some of the most awkward attempts appeared stronger, more resilient. She laughed out loud, delighted that the marks she had called ‘disfigured’ were gracefully strange and restless. She laughed again, glad that her drawings were like little babies, somehow growing in response to being paid attention.

I wrote this story in response to some of Hermann Hesse’s short stories, including The Blue Flower, in which his writing seemed to me to take on an incredible slowness in processing visual information, giving much time to really look at things and think aloud about what they might mean.Thought I’d share it with you here as I’m really grateful for the community here, for the feedback and the encouragement to keep going.

(Also, when I’m overwhelmed and anxious I tend to return to drawing as a slow, tactile, meditative kind of thing.)

Irises

In the centre of a single iris are blue veins, never straight, never repeated, never the same thickness all the way down. She knew this because she had been drawing them day after day. She traced their lines into her notebook, carefully measuring tiny angles, tiny distances, minute creases with her fingers and eyes. The iris, a living natural thing, suspended by the leaves wrapped around its flower, in a narrow clear vase. Each morning and each evening she drew the petals with thin, faint pencil marks leading down to the innards where the blue veins disappeared further down into the stem. Black stamens dangled upwards and she tried to match their flexibility in her marks.

She made the drawings to learn to pay attention. Each single line a minute or two where life passed her by, where she had attended to something very particular in a stiller kind of life. A flower could of course be guessed at or imagined, but could only ever be known through looking – at its tissue thin skin, miniscule swerves, spider-leg columns, never making assumptions or predictions, protecting against distractions, to eventually learn a specific and very different rhythm to the natural stroke of her thumb and forefingers holding the pencil.

She had lain the faint drawings on every surface in her room. She lived with them like you live with a frost, thin white and grey patterns traced. She moved slowly, opening and closing doors gently, for one gust can waft a sheet on to the floor, risking footprints. She knew each piece of paper was already marked with thousands of her undetectable fingerprints. The trail of silver-grey irises had become a path through a hundred slightly different kinds of space. Drawings that captured the crisp form of the iris appeared to fix depth into the page, making a pin-pointed space that reared up or fell away from view with perfect perspective. Others felt their way, making space tactile or emotional, or awkwardly compressing the flower on the paper’s surface, disfiguring, crushing space and form alike as in a black hole.

She was tilting her finger and thumb to follow the curve of a petal when an electronic chime announced the first guest.

It was her birthday.

She had planned to sweep the drawings up into piles to make room for laying the table. The irises in their vase would have made a nice centrepiece and set off the blue serviettes. But the drawn irises still floated on their curling paper lake on every available surface; a delicate ecosystem of observations, some painstaking, some clumsy, some ripped and a few just finished. She dimmed the ceiling lights and pulled the curtains to, a little dazed, ushering in, smiling.

(click through to the next post for the rest of the story, a-n wisely only allows 700 words per post)

This week has been sort of productive and sort of tiring.

I never manage to get through the Artist’s Way from beginning to end. Always get burnt out at some point, too much pain and short-lived enthusiasm – and the kind of spirituality that only jars with me, or that’s a bit too challenging on my traumatised Christian-childhood, trying to make it on my own, soul.

But one remark made by Julia Cameron, that book’s author, and an artist herself, keeps coming back to me this week.

She writes about the word ‘Kriya’, meaning a cry of the soul that gets expressed in the body. I’ve been pretty unwell this week, nothing serious, but frustrating and stopping me from really working in the way that I need to. On Monday I cried and cried, felt so devastated and miserable, worried that I’d never get my priorities straight, that I’d always be working on projects that I think I ought to (academia, writing?) rather than doing the work that I constantly plan and don’t push into (drawing, painting, sewing, singing).

So I wonder if the awful insomnia, headaches and nausea – due to some medication I’m on – might be interpreted as a sort of ‘Kriya.’ Telling me that it’s the last straw, that I need to refocus, to narrow down my goals and pick the ones that really mean something to me.

I understand that’s only the first step in all of this. Making the decision I mean. But making the decision to work as an artist is the first step, right? And it’s a good step, I think. I also took step two – developing a drawing habit – and step three – splashing my hot teary face with water and walking into the city to buy art supplies. What’s step four?

I have so much else to get done right now – MA dissertation, freelance projects on the go, job hunting in the UK and the USA, moving house (neighbourhood, then city and continent) again at least 3 times in the next two months, sorting out the problems with my medication, figuring out how to get on the right continent to be with my partner…

I might finally have given up any hope of rescue. I give in. I’m not usually this dramatic when I write. I’ll let you know how this artist-thing goes. I feel like I’ll be somehow living a little more on my own terms. I’m probably romanticising it all but there you go. A lot of this stuff stems from romance, right?

Just a quick post today… I’ll write a longer one soon and catch you up with the crazy month that July has been!

BLOG: My blog’s 30 Days of Drawing project has gone really well. My blog traffic has increased by a decent margin, and I’ve come to meet and find out about several interesting artists’ and writers’ work. So that’s been good. I’m beginning to wish I could find a way to monetize my blog, though I’m certainly grateful for the outlet and networking/frienship opportunities it has so far provided. To the end of making dollars, I’ve started reading Darren Rowse’s Problogger book, which details how he grew a blogging business of his own. Sounds like a hell of a lot of hard work, but it might just be worth it. After a year of funded graduate study, and a build up of freelance writing tasks that convince me I have what it takes to make this professionally, I hate the idea of working for someone else ever again! Down with office work!

DRAWING: I didn’t manage to draw every day, but I certainly drew much more in the month of July than I have for the past few months combined. I suppose a bit of accountability and time-management, and willingness to get a little tired and stressed in the process is helpful – at least in the short term. I will be doing another rethink of where I want to get to in life, and how an art practice might fit into that sometime soon. But I’m definitely grateful for the experience of incorporating drawing into my daily life. It hasn’t yet become a habit but maybe it will eventually. I’m ashamed to say that I didn’t work on my representational skills as much as I had wanted to, however, I learned a lot about the pleasure of working with line, pencil, paper and ink, in a way that I’m sure will continue to motivate me in the future.

ART HISTORY: is going really well… will update with more info later… Suffice to say that August will be much more of a stay-at-home, or in a cafe/bookshop, typing up dissertation and doing freelance writing assignments. Much, much less travel.

Phew!!

If you’re interested, see http://beckyhunter.co.uk for the entire 30 Days of Drawing project!

ART HISTORY: Using the Wi-fi on the Megabus to New York City! On my way to look at some Agnes Martins, Barnett Newmans, Mona Hatoums and Yayoi Kusamas for my dissertation. Also meeting a friend that I haven’t seen for a couple of years. V nice day ahead, full of coffee, chats, and furious notemaking.

Also have the challenge of trying to figure out how to photograph these works. The Martins in particular are notoriously difficult to reproduce, and I will have to make copious annotated sketches to remind myself which bit of close-up grid is which in my images.

INTERVIEW: Just wanted to signpost my recent interview with musician and illustrator Jeffrey Lewis. Do let me kmow what you think. I’ve been a fan of his for years and was thrilled that he agreed to do a interview with me for 30 Days of Drawing.He’s written/drawn for the UK Guardian and the New York Times amongst many other great publications.

GALLERY: I must remember to contact some arty/gallery/studio people in Philadelphia asap to start building a network out here, and learnign how I can best contribute to the existing situation. Things have been so busy here in Philly/Boston/now NY, that the gallery stuff has fallen on the back burner. Though yesterday evening I did take a lovely walk around the 50th St and Baltimore Ave area in Philly to start thinking about how the gallery would work with other young creative businesses in the area.