Threads

The Edit

So much of what I present to the public relies upon the edit. The judicious pruning. I’m not sure what percentage of my time is spent doing this – either consciously or subconsciously. But each piece of work, be it writing (even here if you can believe it!), songwriting, sound work, music, and drawing, all rely on a series of decisions while making, naturally, but the subsequent conscious editing is also crucial.

I have a couple of exhibitions coming up. I’m feeling the pressure a little, because I believe both of them are important to my artistic development and yes, dammit, my career. (The Art Career may be the subject of another post, but not here).

So there’s a lot going on in the studio and in my head and in the business end. I have a large pile of large drawings to review. For this I have enlisted the help of friend and fellow drawer Sarah Goudie. She is wise and knowledgeable about the practice of drawing, and is good at prompting the right sort of thinking to get me on the edit track. For one of the exhibitions I need six pieces of work… I have decided five drawings and one sound piece/song. 

I’ve said here before that although I draw on large pieces of paper, I’m not always convinced that going large is a thing in itself. But there is something about endurance here. A large piece of paper covering the entirety of the table requires commitment, tenacity, stamina. The work I do on those large pieces are different to those I do in a sketchbook or even on a piece cut to A1 or A2. However, it doesn’t mean that everything on that tablecloth of paper is worth letting loose on the world. The judgement and edit, ultimately, is mine to make. The part of the brain used to make that decision is I think, different to the part that makes it. I recruit the help to nudge my brain into that different mode and function.

So last week the large sheets were laid out on the gallery floor and we talked about what I liked, what worked (and didn’t) and why. There’s a physicality to be engaged with, a scale that can’t exist on Instagram. One of the exhibitions is purely online – the other hopefully both real and online. There’s a dance isn’t there? We walk into a space and we are drawn to an image… we get closer… then we get right in there so we can see the quality of line/material and try to figure out what it is. This is before we try to guess or ascribe any meaning (the artist’s or our own).

So how much of this drawing holds the quality I am looking for, as the artist? Which bits then detract from that? Where do I make the cuts?

I had originally thought that the same work would exist in both exhibitions, but as the edit goes forward I realise that I have a different opportunity within the edit to push the work forward, to focus slightly differently for each. The online work is not about scale, so the hugeness of the paper (6’x4’?) Isn’t an issue. But I can get in really close to that quality of line here. 

For the first instance then, I will concentrate on the works for the gallery, and get them mounted, sliced accurately, and carefully, professionally scanned. These scanned images can then be used not just as details, but digital images in their own right that could be projected, or printed if required. And as such they become something different. Once I have the high resolution scanned image I can play again and edit again. From these original works I shall then select the pieces to feature in the online exhibition. This feels much more satisfactory than just pictures from a gallery, in a second choice venue. These will be designed for purpose.

………

Meanwhile… in the music end of the studio I have started singing. Again it will all be in the cut. But I am starting to see and accept (and maybe I will eventually actually relish) the difference. I cannot yet be in the same room as my producer, in a professional music studio, but I do have the means to record. And he has the means to edit what I record. They are not “clean” recordings. But they are of interest. The background noises can be edited out to a certain extent, but they can also be exploited as a different quality of line.

Both exhibitions will include a song… at least one sound piece… and this edit has its own process. Decisions are being made according to the cloth we have to cut.

It may be that eventually I do re-record my vocal in Michael’s studio. In the meantime, as a point of pause and assessment this is good. I have audio and visual that have been made at the same time, they have influenced each other.

And that, in a nutshell, is the whole point.

Yes, I’ve been reading…

This might seem like a strange statement. It seems strange to me. I was the child (and the adult) who would carry on reading if the house was on fire. 

When I undertook, in 2010, a Masters in Art Practice and Education, I decided that I had to put on hold that sort of reading because I had a different sort of reading to do. So for two years I read art and philosophy, badly, grudgingly, and with only the end-result essay in mind as I read. I lost all the pleasure of it. I wasn’t getting engrossed, I was merely scanning for something I could use. Occasionally I would come across something that held me, but not often. And when I did, it seemed to be the “wrong sort” of reading. So, after all that, I gave up. I got the MA but never regained that sense of joy in reading. I feel bereaved really. Here I am 11 years later and I still haven’t got it back… but I can see glimmers of hope. 

I seem to be able to read non-fiction, of the episodic, biographical type. I’ve read a Sandi Toksvig book, and I’m coming to the end of Caitlin Moran’s More Than A Woman. I know. Hardly taxing, but it’s like stretching muscles that haven’t been used.

I’ve also read little bits of poetry, and I’ve read song lyrics as if poetry. 

I’ve tried fiction. People have suggested the “un-put-down-able” to me, and after a chapter and a half at best, I have indeed, put them down. I can’t be bothered. This really saddens me, because I do remember the feeling of total immersion. Maybe I’m getting there slowly.

I also wonder if my eyes are part of the problem too. I am on my second set of varifocals and I don’t have the field of vision required for prolonged reading I don’t think. Even with these really expensive ones. Or maybe I’ve worn out my eyes with drawing and they need a break?

Audio books perhaps?

Anyway… there is good news… I bought “Drawing Water” by Tania Kovats (I don’t seem to have given up buying books it seems!) and it has been a revelation. If anyone knows Tania, thank her from me. I am able to open this book at random, sink into the words, for a few pages at a time, and come up for air feeling refreshed and inspired. Since the book arrived I have written about ten song lyrics inspired by its pages. “Some Of My Favourite Lines Do Not Exist” kept me going for days. And even when I read other pages, I often skip back to those.

So, in hope, I have this pile by my studio table. I’m just about to have a big Tidy-Up in order that they are more accessible. You’ll notice most of them have bits of ribbon/paper/post its as markers of where I’ve got to, or points of interest, but maybe only two of them are “finished”.

I found I was tying myself in.

It is way too soon to be doing that, but in some ways I have found it reassuring. If it all goes pear-shaped tomorrow, I have work that will be ok to produce that has some merit. But that really isn’t the point is it?

So I gave myself a jolly good talking to, on the top of the safety net/security blanket of “it’ll be ok if…”

I need to remember that this time is precious for the art of play. It is far too soon to be doing settling, however reassuring!

So I let go. 

I let go of the presumptions that just because something is like this now, it has to stay this way. Particularly with some of the songs. I have initial recordings from when they were written, in a couple of cases, actually three years ago. I have been listening to them like this, but I am free to ask the question “Does it need to stay like this?” The answer is most definitely “NO!”

Same with the drawings. Not everything I try needs to be exhibitable. Indeed it’s far better at this stage if it is NOT. I need to free myself up to play.

This can be the double edged sword of the funded art activity though. The responsibility of being publicly funded can mean you feel obliged to make it ALL worthy. It really doesn’t have to be like that. In my case it MUSTN’T be like that, otherwise the project period will finish with me in exactly the same place as when I started but will a slightly higher polished finish, but with the work no further on! 

And what is the point of that?

I have to say though, this can be my default tendency. I have become better at recognising it, stepping back, ripping it up and starting again. But it can be a bit scary, when you look at a good drawing and a good song and think “That’s ok, that!” And then I have to tell myself that that sort of attitude never got anyone anywhere. That’s not pushing hard enough. It’s not good enough if it is comfortable. I have to teeter on the edge a bit.

I have been away from the blog and the studio for two weeks. I’ve moved house. This has been more exhausting than I had imagined: physically my joints are shot; mentally I have had days when I couldn’t string a sentence together. It’s also, naturally, been emotional… 38 years in one house is a lot to move away from, but it was the right time.

This weekend though, I’m starting to emerge from it all. Most of the boxes are now unpacked. Normal life is able to function, all spaces habitable if a bit higgledy piggledy. So now I’m thinking that a day in the studio might be just the thing.

I have much to do, but I need to be in the studio in order to make the studio lists. In the house I seem only capable of making house lists.

I need to get back to Drawing Songs. The planned Christmas/new year break was elongated by the house move, but there’s not much gone awry in terms of the project as a whole. In fact, it’s all going pretty well.

I think the biggest thing in my head is to start singing. I don’t mean in the car or the shower… I mean proper warmed-up, concentrated, in front of a mic singing. Because only then do I do it properly. It’s been nearly a year since the last gig, and I’ve hardly sung at all. I was just starting to get the hang of it too! I need to be studio-fit when we get the nod from the government that it is safe to do so.

I’ve also got a couple of exhibitions to think about. One that will hopefully be real, in Birmingham, and one online that will hopefully contain some musical aspects. I’m particularly looking forward to that, as it will be the first time I have done this for an exhibition that isn’t self-generated. I’m keen to know how it works, and how it will be received by a wider audience… I’ll let you know when that happens!

What follows is a transcript of the previous, handwritten post:

How do I see drawing?

What is its purpose for me?

A long time ago a drawing was something done on paper with a pencil. Its purpose was to record an observation or an imagination. Onlookers would be able to identify its lines – a house – a tree – a person – which particular person perhaps. It might also have been a plan or a design or a map. It might be the outline of something to be coloured in later with crayon or paint.These purposes remain, but now my drawings are extra to this. They are both more, and less.

My drawings grew from a different need. They grew from the need to dig deeper, to explore a feeling. These feelings gathered around an illness and radiated out to touch other elements of my life and to connect and hold them together. I had been stitching for decades, connecting things, people, ideas, with garments and words. Then I stopped. I ground to a halt slowly and gradually, morphing into something else.Because of an illness I needed to physically change the scale of my work top make it transportable and to make it easy to pick up for five minutes. It needed to be pared down… to a small sketch pad and a pen. The writing and drawing inhabited the same page. The writing sometimes strayed from the lines and the drawings sometimes peppered the lines of writing where there was a job to be done. I began to realise that the stitched works showing my thoughts, illustrating them for my audience. At this point I wanted more. The stitched pieces and the beginnings of poetry and songwriting needed to do more than illustrate, for me, and perhaps also for my audience. This was not a sudden thing. It was slow, insidious, careful and sneaky.

As the illness waned, the drawings expanded and started to leak out from the sketchbooks onto larger paper (in the studio). What started to emerge from my fingers were unrecognisable forms and lines. This was not a design to be coloured in. This was no map. These were not observations… although they held familiar textures and lines of an organic nature. Fifty years of observational drawing had shown itself and those tools and skills were being called upon.

What I found was this: the illustrative quality of previous work talked of touch, between people, often children. It had emotion and a poignancy but was often also sinister and macabre. Now I found that I was using my materials as a metaphor for these relationships. My pencils reacted to the paper. The colours reacted to each other, pigments merging and rejecting. I found the box of old ink pensant nibs and discovered the scratchy nature of these old men and women on rough watercolour paper gave me something new. A different touch was being felt as I stroked gently and scratched jarringly across the paper. I could enact these relationships instead of portraying and showing an illustration of them to other people. I drew as I breathed, as I sang, as I listened, as I ate and drank. I also drew as I wrote. Some of the words that entered my thoughts ended up on the paper. Sometimes these words were already in songs being sung. Sometimes they became songs afterwards. This all-absorbing expression of the people and the emotionI felt was being performed across the paper stretched out on the table in front of me.

I draw constantly, but not all of the drawings are satisfactory in terms of how they “work” for me. Most consist of repetitive lines, meditations, a sort of seeking and exploration. They might be a map, but I don’t know where to.

I can’t always tell where the line is between drawing, writing, song, and performance. At the moment I suppose I see a line/lines between them because they still have those separate words to describe them. But this (hand) writing also feels like a drawing of my current state of mind and I use the same pen to draw these words out across the pages. The writing has sound and rhythm and the words have meaning that others can understand, so they are also songs. The songs I write describe more than a drawing with paper and pencil. They flesh out the relationships I observe and participate in. A voice in song conveys emotion through all of those sounds, all those elements of melody, harmony, rhythm, lyrics, delivery – especially delivery! The line like the pencil or ink line, the sung line does not need to be perfect. In fact it conveys more when it is not. In the same way that as my drawing skills and thinking skills matured, I stopped wanting, or seeing the need for perfect representation. I now see that is not necessary for every single note to be in perfect tune. In performance it can be seen to convey with an immediacy that doesn’t require perfection but a truth of the held emotion.

What I require in the drawing, the writing, the sounds, songs, and the performance is that truth. My truth. I want what I make to be authentically me, mine.

It has now become important that the decisions I make concerning the songs and the singing of them, are mine. Unique… obviously influenced by what I have lived through, just as my drawings on paper reveal those 50 years (or more) of observation.

As I look into the future of my drawing of all types across all those media, I’d like to see them connect more. I’d also like the threads and traces (Tim Ingold, Lines) between them to be less distinct  (or do I mean more distinct? Closer connections, the disciplines less distinct?)

I’m unsure whether these distinctions and in distinctions will be visible/audible/legible to any onlooker/listener/reader… and I’m not sure I care that much.

Drawing Songs, as a distinct project is the beginning of that exploration and endeavour.

They are not a set of songs which accompany a set of drawings.

They are all drawings and they are all songs.