Drawing Journal

The point of any practice surely is to learn, evaluating as one goes so that there is some kind of betterment. Nevertheless, getting stuck in those formulaic methods of seeing and responding still happens, particularly, as with reportage drawing, the mark-making has to be so fast and reactive.

I know that my coffee shop drawings lack context. Too hung up on trying to show gait, details of clothes, interactions with others, I am often unable to describe the environment in which they are sitting or queuing.

The intention is there but I have to say it’s the human content that most moves and engages me.

As do the personal narratives therein, or at least the ones I attach to those that I sketch. Like the girl with long blonde hair who sat at the table across from us watching some kind of broadcast on her phone (that I imagined to be live footage from Ukraine) her face full of concern.

Or the man standing in the interminable queue reading the headlines of his paper, no doubt caught by the same awful drama that I imagined her to be.

As was the man with the terrier, who he always balances on his knee, and his friend, who looks ill and lost, who I overheard discussing the invasion.

There’s so much to relate and sometimes my energy and my confidence fails me. And then there are the regulars who I try to draw over and over and don’t succeed. Some unnerve me because I sense their reluctance to be so closely monitored, like ‘Dylan Thomas’ or the ‘Track-suit Man’.

They are both shy, clearly, diffident men. Though ‘Dylan’ rallies when he has to engage with the staff, making jokes (or at least responding to theirs) but his awkwardness is there in the way he holds his body, lost in all that bagginess. And ‘TSM’ – he fascinates me. He is utterly self-contained and so decided in his dress.

Do I harm these strangers by taking their likenesses? Do I hurt them by posting them here? I sent one image to someone I know vaguely and she seemed delighted with it and asked if she could put it up on her Instagram account. A small fillip and then the flatness comes and  I think what it is all for.

I may not get the grant after my second submission and then what? Meanwhile, I’m amassing a great stock of sketchbooks – what for? Posterity? And then, comes a gift.

Unbeknown to me, she’d been observing me from the queue. And the next thing she was standing before me. ‘I’ve been watching you,’ she said,’ and they’re amazing!’ She had her hand on her heart. ‘You’ve made my day!’ she said. Is it enough? It was then.

I want a lot from it. And sometimes it is the only thing that makes sense. Drawing, for me at least, is a true thing, an authentic thing. It goes beyond thinking, and that is its pleasure for me. I get beyond myself in my urgency, my desire to communicate what I see, and what I feel about the person I am drawing. And this intensity, for it is, at times intense, exists mostly (no, almost wholly) when I am drawing people.

And it’s not about capturing likeness, that is neither here nor there, it is about observing, feeling, noticing and engaging with their being, or at least what is communicated about that being through their stance, their gait and how they respond bodily to those around them.

Like the man with the hairs growing down his neck who before going off to the loo threw down a music manuscript onto the table which he later read over his coffee. Or the tall woman with the corkscrew-curled hair who talked of her three children to the baristas and then greeted her wife with a passionate kiss.

It is a kind of entering into their lives, I am paying attention to them. Is this OK? I do worry away about the ethics of it.

There is often quite a bit of sadness emanating from those I draw and re-draw. Like the giant of a man who dresses in the big oil-skin coat and has huge feet, or the man we call ‘track-suit’ man because he always wears one, tucking the top into the trousers’ waistband, or the man I’ve not see before who came in for a coffee holding a small briefcase. And then there are the young, all braggadocio with their lean, as yet unrigid bodies.

And then there’s my own battles with my drawing, is it getting better? Shall I try this pen or that? Should it be looser, less mannered? On and on.

And with always the same question, is it enough? Will it be enough?

‘So it will be like Rolf Harris, then?’ said my partner when I told him about the changes I want to make to my project. He was referring, of course, to the Saturday night programmes that Rolf Harris used to host where he would do a huge painting before an audience, with ‘Can you see what it is yet?’ being his catchphrase. ‘No,’ I reply to him, ‘not like Rolf Harris.’ And yet, if I am asking to people (or at least getting the galleries to tell their audience that I will be there drawing) to come and see me drawing is it not the same? Will I be some kind of side-show, or even freak, show? Are the public interested in drawing? I like the idea of the ‘live-ness’ of it.

It is real, I will be challenged, something will happen amidst the fear, the danger and the unexpected-ness of it.

Or perhaps nothing will, like the times when I draw in the coffee shop and no one, absolutely no one comes in and I sink like a soufflé.

Aren’t most forms of creation like that, though? Sometimes it is there and it is marvellous to both behold and to feel and others it is a damp squib.

Meanwhile, I try to keep this drawing practice going, waiting, my breath held. to hear from the galleries whether I have their blessing to offer myself up as performer or not.

All I can do is keep drawing, honing, watching, observing, noting and trying to improve.

They’ve suggested I resubmit my application for ACW funding. I don’t know, and yet I’ve thought of little else all week. There is fear, certainly. Will I be rejected again? The project needs a rethink and I’ve done it. I’ve rethought.

And I wonder if I can do it. Just draw, that is. Just draw in front of people, in front of the people who I am drawing. After all I do it in the coffee shop but in a gallery it will be different. I long to try it.

No, that is not quite true, I want to test myself, to see what I can do in the glare of the public eye. Will they be interested? Will my prospective partners and indeed the funders be interested? Is just drawing enough?

I had three people asking what I was doing in a space of two days. This is unusual even considering the fact that I’ve been drawing the customers in the same coffee shop for almost five months now. The first one was a man we see regularly (the one I asked if he used patchouli oil). I’d been to the loo and I heard him talking to my partner on my way back. ‘Is your wife drawing?’ he said. The second was a Northern Irish woman who was sitting at a table next to ours with her daughter. I’d seen her looking over at me and as they got ready to go she too asked if I was drawing. She bubbled over with energy (perhaps it was excitement at seeing her daughter who is studying here). And the question soon led to an explanation of the fact that she’d ‘couldn’t draw for toffee’ but that her brother could but he gave it up to become a science teacher. She was marvellous, all those words spilling off her tongue, interspersed with an almost constant refrain of ‘What was I going to say?’ The third questioner was one of the wild swimmers that frequent the café after their morning dip. ‘Is she drawing?’ she asked my partner, adding, ‘Can I be nosy and have a look?’ She leant over and was seemingly delighted. ‘Gosh, aren’t you clever,’ she said, ‘and so fast. I can’t draw to save my life.’ I shrink from such notice and from having my books flicked through but it is also a warming thing somehow. After all, they are my subjects, are they not? When she asked ‘What do you do with them?’ that was altogether more tricky. ‘It’s drawing practice,’ I said, qualifying it by repeating, ‘I’m practicing.’ She just looked more bemused. And her question continued to hang in the air.

The uncertainty regarding the privacy and ‘safety’ of the people I draw preys on my mind. Am I hurting them? I ask myself. There’s the woman who came in alone, after being granted a respite day from her ‘frail’ husband, and the man we now call ‘tracksuit man’ (apparently he researches genealogy in the town’s library, though this doesn’t explain why he dresses like football coach with his tracksuit top tucked neatly into his tracksuit bottoms).

And the gaggle of girls with hair and tights in a variety of pinks who commandeered the long table.

I’d set myself the task of trying to capture the queue in its entirety. A challenging goal, I think.

Perhaps that’s it. The only way to get round the safety thing is to draw the now countless dogs who come to the shop with their owners.