cloud studies - drawing practise

These two  tiny studies were made in the Autumn of last year, and thrust out of sight into a drawer so that I wouldn't destroy them. I have but recently returned once more to drawing, following a hiatus of some months after the two studies above were made.

I find my drawing practice much subject to inconsistency; I begin, tremulously, only to cease, having suffered a crushing sense of defeat and loss of confidence. However, periods of activity do follow each jarring halt, even if after a few weeks, or sometimes months have elapsed, and I am learning how to draw again, beginning to trust my nervous hand and reacquaint myself with my materials.

It seems that I can only draw in isolaton; I deliberately close my mind to the works of other artists, and indeed to my own earlier works, and seek to attain a meditative state, concentrating solely on the drawing in hand. I use small off cuts of paper, as yet not trusting myself to embark upon a 'finished' work on the larger sheets of paper upon which I was formerly accustomed to drawing.

As it is with my practice, so it is with studying the clouds themselves; sometimes I cannot bear to look on them, so inadequate in my endeavour do I feel. I may studiously ignore the changing cloudscapes above for weeks, before returning to my former passionate observation.

I am presently conscious of a rennaisance of will and intent, fragile still though it may be, and although often prey to bouts of deepest despair, am increasingly able to navigate a safe passage through these, or at least to wait until they have passed, now better equipped to understand that they do indeed pass,  and are replaced by calmer moods  more conducive to the resumption of  drawing practise.

wind chime

A tangle of painted glass and cotton threads lying on a table at the local car boot sale one bitter morning in early February catches my eye, occasions a start of recognition, for this is something that I have not seen since childhood, when it's replica hung at the window of my parent's kitchen forty or so years ago.

Fearing that the frail object may not be complete, that some of the glass may be broken, I carefully take it up in my hand to examine it more closely. Once suspended from my fingers, the threads realign themselves, and the glass pieces swing freely from them, an evocative, delicate mineral chime sounding on the cold air as they touch against each other.

What chance that I should find undamaged, save for the loss of the bottom most central pendant, such a thing, on such a morning as this, when the wind blows without inhibition from the North, and my joyfully resurging memories are of balmy afternoons in Spring, the kitchen window flung open to admit the scented moving air, my younger self transfixed with pleasure at the complex configuration of pellucid sounds as the fragile chimes strike one another in  response to the tremulous breeze?