Just over a week ago I was at the Royal Drawing School for two days with fellow ODDY students enjoying their real life company immersed in playful collaborative drawing. Back home I m having a crisis of confidence and stress. It’s the usual combination of time available / production of work / framing time and cost, that looms before an exhibition. Theoretically I have work I could show already, but I want to show drawings that say something specific about my thoughts, ideas and concerns. Unfortunately the confidence/stress pact undermines every mark I put on the page and makes me question my thinking to the point where I can start wondering if even my ideas are valid.
Moving away from the spiral of negative collapse, I have this week, put up panels of Sundealer board in my studio, something I’d been planning to do since I started using the space at the beginning of last year. It’s good to be able to efficiently display all that work I’m despairing of.
Therefore as I look up from my desk I can see two monotypes that I was excited by when I made them and I’m still excited by now, so tomorrow when I have studio time I will endeavour to do some more.
My year with the Royal Drawing School is both finished and unfinished, scheduled class commitments sit behind me, commitments to my own practice in front. Immediately ahead lie two in-house drawing days meeting most of the ODDY cohort in person for the first time and then a group exhibition in March. But also ahead I hope, is the continuation and enrichment of our group into a mutually supportive entity with its part played in all our future practice.
The course imposed a discipline that on non wage earning days saw me in my studio daily from 10 – 5 and thinking about being in there, at all the other times! In the final term I began to long for time to develop a multitude of arising ideas and now I have it, or at least, I have it as much as I ever will. Participation in the ODDY necessitated a collaborative structure (isn’t that what partly attracts artists to courses?) the blocking out of hours and days for playing and thinking and doing. Post ODDY, the beginning of 2024 finds me assembling a new structure dedicated to giving those ideas life and still playing, thinking and doing.
It’s almost the end of the spring term, and the end of the first term of the RDS ODDY. I’m absolutely ready for a break and I’m trying to desist from filling the forthcoming holiday with other commitments, commitments that is, which take me away from undirected time with my own work and reflection on the past term.
I feel my work is reassembling into a form again. I feel energised and driven by re-seeing a route to follow that I had started to move along prior to last year, but I’m also wary, a familiar journey is not necessarily a creative one. I need to explore alternative routes and encounter different terrain. Every now and then I get glimpses of where my work could go, like tiny twinkles of light through a dense wood that disappear as I change position, but I’m happy with that, it’s both guiding and unsettling.
I’ve loved being immersed in the ODDY experience, my drawing is feeling more direct and accurate to what I want to say and there’s a feeling of being wound up ready to go. Sometimes I feel as though work could come pouring out, hopefully over Easter it will.
I’m five weeks into a year long course with the Royal Drawing School; the Online Drawing Development Year or ODDY.
Last year was filled with the intensity, joy and grief of looking after my father. The practicalities, emotions and changed relationship I had with Dad and other family members filled head and heart. Looking back that time seems akin to the burning passions of youth where everything seemed energised, heightened and pulled to emotional extremes, but I’m not sure it felt like that at the time. When Dad died life filled with grief and relief.
However within the exhaustion and distress, and the humour and love I think that my relationship to the world (the relationship as I perceive it to be that is), shifted in a positive and entirely unanticipated way. Right now I’m excited for the future, I have work I need to make, I have direction, I have capacity.
In committing to the ODDY I’m hoping to immerse myself in my drawing to see what comes out, I’m wanting to renew clear boundaries between studio time, family and paid work and to enjoy being part of an intense drawing community. Dad would be excited for me.
In the weeks since my last blog I feel as if I have been emotionally thrown backwards and forwards like a ball on a parcel shelf in car that continuously takes corners too fast. I have managed to complete a couple of paintings for my next show, accepted a couple that I would have worked on more had circumstances been different and I’ve started to explore new ideas through drawings.
At the moment life is dominated by caring for my father. The structure of day and night unravels as quickly as I try and plan things, lists get left undone and replaced by bizarre conversations that take in the past, the hallucinated and the misunderstood. Under the influence of Dad’s medication and his cancer, his thoughts and ideas come out undeveloped or strangely deformed. My time is not my own and my head space has had its boundaries dissolved.
Dad’s health and and state of mind go up and down, but the trend is always downwards. His mood is both impetuous and unpredictable, but in trying to bring peace to an unsettled mind, I find there are only threads holding my own thoughts together.
