Circling round and back to nature
To where, let's face it, everything leads in the end.
Welcome, or welcome back to my musings on the intersection between life and my creative practice.
This feels like a transitional time.
This morning my teenage daughter and I clung to each other briefly in a deep hug and I murmured ‘It’s OK, it’s just there’s a lot changing at the moment’. I think I was speaking to myself as much as to her.
As a mother, a woman and an artist, I can feel the ground shifting beneath my feet every day. And the response can be to panic and cling to anything that seems solid or familiar. Or to retreat to safe territory. Surely the ground is supposed to just, well, be there. Kind of solid and reliable, not wobbling or slipping away altogether.
And yet I’m slowly realising that much of the change I’m experiencing personally and creatively is a peeling back of layers to uncover what has been there all along, rather than a headlong slide into newness. It feels new because, well, it’s been a while since I saw it all.
That love of drawing that kept me absorbed as a child.
That urge to write that drove me on as a teenager.
That longing for fulfilment that led me onto the path as an educator.
When I was a child my family had a traditional narrow boat on the canals of the Midlands. Reading about life on a narrowboat in James Roberts’
Into the Deep Woods brought back many vivid memories of watching nature up close from the boat or from the tow path. Birds, fish, trees, the water itself rippling gently as the boat pushed through. But what I remembered too was sitting at the table inside the boat as a rainy day slipped by outside, working for hours on a drawing of a bird with my coloured pencils, absorbed in the deepening layers of marks I was creating. It’s probably my first memory of creative flow and a sense of agency that I could realise on paper the forms I had seen outside or in my head.
Likewise, as I got older, there is the memory of sitting on the windowsill of my bedroom at home with my mum’s hefty old manual typewriter in front of me, watching the clouds and trees outside and trying to describe them - and what they made me feel - in words. In my head I saw myself years in the future, sitting at a cafe table in Paris, absorbed in the same process (sadly that hasn’t happened - yet).
Surely these are the same longings I am uncovering now that I am giving time over to finding my own creative practice.
I have recently written about sifting through ten years’ worth of sketchbooks as part of my end-of-degree clear out.
On looking through a decade's worth of sketchbooks
There are thirty, maybe forty sketchbooks piled in front of me. The earliest are dated 2015. All shapes and sizes, some super professional with sleek black covers but many handmade, cobbled together from leftover papers and fastened together with string or masking tape. These are my favourites, little…
And one of the things I noticed first was how much of the imagery from my first few years was drawn from nature, before my gaze turned increasingly inwards. The sketchbooks are filled with drawings of grasses and leaves, pine cones, acorns and stones. Spiky chestnut casings and broken twigs.
Not so different from the bird I drew aged 10.
Through the later stages of my textiles degree, my work became more internal and emotive, still created in relationship with nature only based on a sense of my human self being part of the wider natural world and the natural processes of change and decay. And my work became rooted in a deep sense of belonging that had only been a quiet, unacknowledged whisper in those early days.
Emerging from this healing journey, I am now looking around, outwards and upwards again. Blinking as I emerge as from the dark woods into summer light. Once again my camera is full of photos of leaves and stones, grasses and flowers, only this time there is a sense of connection and oneness rather than simply observation. My latest paintings and drawings are responses to the landscape and my stitch work is tracing the paths of my own movement through different places.
So maybe rather than a time of change in the sense of newness, the shifting ground I feel as an artist at least is more of a journey back to the self.
On the studio wall:
Top - work in progress (a long way in and a long way from finished) in acrylics and mixed media.
Bottom - a 5 minute charcoal drawing.
The challenge - capture the looseness and expressiveness of the drawing in the painting.
When does a painting become a drawing or a drawing become a painting?
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Engrossed with the stitched pathways, couching presents almost stops or bumps along the way as one might travel. Beautiful work you've shared. A lot of feeling
Years of accumulation of thought and feelings build together in new ways of thinking. Formal art training I see as the icing on the cake, the cherry on top is the work we create after formal training finishes and we take our own path.
Exciting journey ahead.