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?
