Mental Drawing.
It was so easy to write loftily that I was inspired to “re-evaluate my practice with a focus on drawing”, (what does that even mean?) when the time came to actually do something about it, to walk the talk, put my money where my mouth is and get off the pot, I procrastinated, not helped by the recently discovered Huffingington Post tweets, with seductive titles like: “Woman contracts plague from choking cat”, suddenly irresistible.
My drawing had become diagrammatic, almost entirely functional, a mere tool, passively subservient to my three dimensional work. I laid out ink, paper, pens and brushes and gave myself some rules like Sol Lewitt, intent on simply making marks and concentrating on the process, but first I had to read: “Tongue stuck in water bottle for eight hours.”
“After a while it became nonsensical, my mind told me I was doing a ridiculous thing.”
I took a brush full of ink and made a casual mark (fig 1) and then made another in relation to the first. It felt good. Soon my hand fell into a pattern, with easy gliding bits, fast and slow, and bits where my hand was pushing, working against the bend in the brush. After a while it became nonsensical, my mind told me I was doing a ridiculous thing. I pressed on. And then everything began to make beautiful sense, my hand, the brush, the marks.
In a deliciously meditative state the second drawing developed contours with hand pressure translating into light and shade. It was all going rather well. Cocky, I made some inkblots ala Rorschach and things began to go downhill. The tinkered with ink blots were beyond dark, verging on disturbing-I binned them.
“And then I found the pipette with all its dribbly potential and forgetting the rules managed to go completely off piste.”
I read “Causing fear and alarm with black pudding” which cheered me up enough to make drawing number 3, with a fat, square brushfull of ink and nice repetitive tonal marks. Much better. And then I found the pipette and all its dribbly potential, (fig 4) forgetting the rules I managed to go completely off piste. What came out of my brush then, almost wilfully kept turning into things: trees, water, whole forests and worryingly sperms!? Every time the figurative reared up I tamped it down, wiping out, scraping off and trying again. It all got a bit Sorcerer’s Apprentice and four hours later, filthy and knee deep in wads of manky toilet roll I gave up.
But tomorrow is another day and I will try again, once I have looked at: “Cat eats with fork”.
