My notebooks are full of little questions I rarely go back to — and if I do, it always seems such an effort to worm my way back into the original excitement of the idea in order to answer them. I could just be drawing something new.
I’m learning, gradually, to phrase the questions as answers, even if only tentative ones. To catch ideas as a sketch or the most fragile of outlines. To just paint the thing and see if, as usual, that solves the conundrum.
It’s a small way of staying in motion.
Cats are great fun as decorative elements, but often difficult to catch on paper.
Saffy, a descended ceiling-cat
When I visit friends with cats, I spend a lot of time chasing their cats around trying to draw them.
This is further complicated by cats who gradually vanish between the sofa cushions while they are being sketched.
From Cassandra Clare’s December 2019 newsletter
It’s fun to glance back occasionally and see them over time — both changes in the cats and in my pursuit of an explanation of how Scottish Folds work.
Here’s Reginald (and Maggie) in 2017.
And some bonus lions from the Melbourne Zoo the same year (“lion-coloured” is one of my favourite colour descriptions):
Sketching makes me like people more.
I liked these people anyway
People in crowds become individuals. (This does relate to yesterday’s post: Sketch Notes).
Why NOT dance with an inflatable unicorn?
The first time I went to the British Museum, I tried to see the Rosetta Stone. It was easy, crowding forward, to resent everyone else who was in the way. So many people. It can’t mean to them what it does to me.
Some access issues
But when I retreated and got out my sketchbook, suddenly each person was an individual, to whom the stone meant something that made it worth seeing, and I was drawing a picture of people loving it.
And sometimes I’m drawing individuals I love, and realise they are a crowd, a whole.
Readercon 2017, tag yourself
This is one of the reasons I like to sketch during O-Week (Orientation Week). It makes me more benevolent in general, which is always nice when I’m about to start teaching again.
Fairy floss!
Everyone comes into focus, busy in their own way. There’s a degree of headshaking around the annual toga party, but look at them! All those teenagers in bedsheets.
The phones, the wings, the Hercules, the occasional serious cosplayers. Body language is 75% funnier in an inexpertly constructed toga and rugby shorts.
Sketching through a manuscript last night.
I don’t have a good mental template for goats.
Pigs are also tricky. Their legs are so stiff. I need to spend more time sitting on a fence drawing them.
One of the many excellent reasons to sketch from life is that your mind and hand start to learn the basic lines that make up an animal or person or a movement — the top picture suggest I’ve spent more time drawing people interacting with clothes than drawing goats at all — and what makes a shadow mean things, and where the drama is in tiny far-off airport workers.
I love sketching people in hi-vis.
It’s the same with writing. Taking notes out and about is a good way to get an appreciation of the range of habits and rhythms of interactions, and Angela Slatter has occasionally given me homework in the form of sitting under a tree for an hour and describing the leaves without using the word “green” (but more vehemently).
I don’t have a picture of the tree-description page, but here are some rainy-day notes.
Even if I never go back to refer to these, even if I’m inventing worlds, the act of noticing gets the world into your fingertips, in all its textures and varieties, and it’s there when you need it.
Of course, it doesn’t just give a template. Sketching reminds me when to deviate from a template. Those are the details and textures that bring a picture or a world to life.
How do people actually interact with plinths?
And it’s suprising how often the person holding out their arms and twirling in a cafe is not, as might be the obvious conclusion, a little girl, but a man demonstrating the move to his daughter, who is holding a stuffed tiger and regarding him with doubt.
Still a bit wobbly at this point, but look ma, no walking stick!
Some thoughts about walking:
2012?!
Teenage magpie hiding under a beehive, in the rain
It’s always “caterpillar grass” to me
He gave up. There’s still just an alley of mown grass through the middle of this backyard forest.
No-one else was using the swing.
Obviously I had my sketchbook with me at this point.
Some tiny birds from the margins and interstices of my notebook/journal. I quite like the faint shadow on the owl (top right).
They aren’t illustrative of anything in particular except, perhaps, horror vacui (what else are dragons for?).
The brown birds were, however, suggested by some sketches I did in the Qld Museum on Saturday, while I watched children being towed away from fascinated contemplation of fossils to look at snakes, and being blindsided by the actual height of a bush stone curlew.
Materials:
(NB: some of those are affiliate links which means I might get a very small commission if you buy something after clicking through, but I do encourage you to buy/order from local art stores if you have them!)
As usual, this is a best-bits version of the trip, where “best-bits” = anything that stayed still long enough to be sketched. You should be able to see a larger version of the pictures by clicking on them, which in most cases will take you through to their Flickr page.
And so: Iceland.
The Light Grey Art Labs residency was wonderful: small, active (very physically active!), interested, entertaining. And Iceland was… I couldn’t process it at first.
I spent my day before the residency looking around the Culture House and worrying about whether I would be able to work out how to process the lava fields I’d seen that morning on the way from the airport.
Because Iceland is, above all, an exceptionally new country. It is horrifyingly young, geologically and in terms of its civilisation. Journey to the Centre of the Earth makes sense here. We all got the theme for Jurassic Park stuck in our heads. Parts seemed like a recently terraformed planet, the rocks are raw and rough and new, steam pours out of the ground.
They didn’t get people until 800AD (give or take a few hermits), and didn’t use wheeled vehicles before the late 19th century.
We looked at sulfurous pits of boiling mud and climbed down lava tubes studded with ice and alive with spectral mists.
There were geysers, and everywhere people made little piles of stones.
Brown stones on clifftops, white stones in niches and arranged in little standing spirals below basalt cliffs.
(This evidence of people marking, decorating, understanding, playing was one of my favourite things).
The lakes steamed. We scrambled over crevasses and into ravines.
We marvelled at the pleated fans of basalt columns, drew volcanic plains and details of moss. Climbed. Watched. Took photos. Thought.
It was wonderful travelling with other artists. Learning from each other over wine in our cabin on Blueberry Hill.
We all approached work and landscape differently, but it was grand to be with people who understood spending half an hour recording the texture of a rock.
Or marvelling at light, or pointing out the rare welcome smoothness of a glacial stone after the raw sharpness of all the others.
We fell in love with moss.
It wasn’t like a fairytale.
Fairytales feel older than Iceland does.
It has fairytales, of course, but we had to learn to look at the land differently. And you start to understand where fairytales come from.
Growing up in Euro-centric Australia, you know there’s ancient and continuous human history but don’t really see it. We’re not taught to see it. We see European history, barely over 2 centuries of it, and then we go to Europe and envy them their castles and forts and standing stones.
Then to go to Iceland, and see their European history is longer than ours, but not by that much, relatively.
And before that? There’s no weight of human story.
I hadn’t realised that I was aware of that, until I came home.
But Iceland was exceptionally beautiful, full of curious microcosms and great raw new-birthed slabs and extrusions of uneroded mountain.
Ash-soft plains.
New-cut gorges.
Horizon-capping glaciers.
Sheep and puffins.
Then I was back in Reykjavik for one more day: museums and movies.
Then on to Oslo.
