sunny Saturday afternoon

 

I finish the third grid drawing this afternoon after my partner, M, has left for his weekend shift at work. The house is quiet. In the garden the fulsome breeze quickens the air and stirs the tall yellow daisies into a Gavotte. I photograph the three drawings, copy the photograph to the computer. I prefer to photograph my work place and thus my drawings , in natural light. The light which penetrates the cotoneaster beyond the window is dappled at midday, silvery in the late afternoon, which is when I photograph the drawings. 

 As I did yesterday, I find my wondering about these small, subtle drawings. My mind is full of the book by Anne Truitt; I am reading the third volume of her autobiography- I have the second on order from the United States, but this arrived by post today and I cannot wait for the third to arrive-and am swiftly drawn into her world. I cannot share her experience of being a wife, mother and artist, only that of being an artist, and a much less prominent one at that. In the third volume she describes herself as having been reclusive, a state of being with which I can identify; since the outbreak of the Covid 19 pandemic, I have become more withdrawn, less able to share my work; indeed withdrew from an exhibition at the cafe of the local Arts Centre because I felt unprepared and had lost faith in my work.

I was to have shown the grid drawings; a major stumbling block would have been-and still is- the cost of having them framed by the framer of my choice, who conducts his business in ethically admirable fashion, and is a framer par excellence. I could imagine how the little sensitive drawings would have appeared- modest- is the word that springs to mind. I am pleased with their modesty, their subtlety, but I was terribly anxious as to how they would appear to others. Often I question whether they are 'art' at all; as I wrote elsewhere it is difficult to keep the faith.

I take myself into the garden with Anne Truitt and Minos and spend a thoroughly absorbing hour or two in their company; Minos claiming my attention periodically as only he knows how to do. The little violas planted over Silas's grave are coming to the end of their exsquisite life; I must seek out winter bedding for him. Beneath the violas are planted bulbs; parrot tulips in shades of creamy lemon, burgundy and burnt orange. I only leave the beguiling Autumnal afternoon when I hear the telephone sound within the house; my youngest sister calls me, then almost immediately afterwards, my mother; we speak for nearly an hour. 

Perhaps I am a mother after all; to my own mother, who turns to us for reassurance and the allaying of fears which assume monstrous proportions in her mind. It was ever thus.

studio evening May 26 2020

On the drawing board lie my old books on bird's eggs and my Observer's book on astronomy; I do also have an Observer's book on bird's eggs, but have frustratingly misplaced it. I have made a beginning to the long series of drawings of bird's eggs, by tracing the outlines of some thirty eggs on tissue paper, to be transposed onto the Japanese paper when the paper arrives; I have, with great excitement, ordered a pack of fifty sheets, which I should be able to tear down into four pieces, thereby yielding some two hundred small sheets.

I have also made a return to drawing imaginary configurations of stars on black paper, whilst I am awaiting the arrival of the Japanese papers, although I may work on both series of drawings concurrently. It may be that I make drawings of the named constellations on black paper; I would love to do this , but am uncertain about my capabilities. Even so there is something about the connectedness of stars and eggs which stimulates my mind, and makes me long to depict the named and 'real' as well as the imaginary.

I did make a series of 'looking glass', or painted egg drawings; I have in my possession a glass egg, with a scene of mountains, lakes and little houses painted upon the inside with great delicacy and exquisiteness. I believe it is Japanese. Using it as inspiration, I drew a small series of my own, painted eggs, even depicting the small hole at the base of the egg through which the paintbrush was originally inserted. Where are these drawings? I no longer have them. Periodic departures of self confidence and bouts of despair are a blight upon my practice; I destroyed the drawings, but that does not mean that I may make no more, indeed, I have determined to begin again, this time with, I hope , enhanced skills and clearer vision. Perhaps I may even draw an egg covered with stars, or with a starry sky depicted, as it were, on the inside of the egg.

With the same thrill of excitement with which I ordered the papers, I have also sourced a copy of the Dorling Kindersley Eyewitness Guide to bird's eggs, and ordered it; when both arrive, I shall embark upon the long series of bird egg drawings about which I feel so much optimism and anticipatory pleasure. The book will come from a bookshop in Petersfield, Hampshire, which is where one of my sisters lives with her husband, so I feel a sense of connection with my family, and with a little town  I know so well, and for which I have great affection. A link with home.

new moon

In the luminous west, just proud of a gathering of feather edged, dove coloured clouds, gleams the steely sliver of the new moon, a precise, sharp tipped crescent, cut clean into the deepening ultramarine of an October twilight. Alone with the young moon in the back garden of a rented house in Somerset, utterly defenceless against the incursion of rememberance, I am recalled without warning to a garden in a more easterly county, there to gaze in retrospection upon an older moon, one waxed full and buxom, whose light embraces those standing together in commemoration of the event; a small family group, mother, father, and a daughter, one of three. Such a time ago it seems, that August evening during which we gathered to celebrate my father's newly restored sight; to be in his company when he first looked on the moon through the binoculars given as a gift, and exclaimed like a child at the wonders he could now see without the ghostly interference of the cateracts that had hitherto sorely distorted his vision.

Several years hence, he has departed this life, and his ashes are scattered in a county yet further eastwards, that which gave birth to him, but that seems woefully distant from the garden where I now salute the glowing sickle of the new moon in memory of him.

I find that I cannot curtail my tears, for although I am removed to a westerly region with a chosen one, whom I hold dearer than life itself, and have become accustomed, more or less, to our very different place of habitation, there persists a dull ache in my heart, a perpetual nostalgia for family, for places familiar, above all, a longing which cannot be assuaged, for the smile of welcome wreathing my father's face on beholding his daughters coming home to him.

moon

I cannot witness the rising of the moon without thinking of my father, who loved the moon, and used to watch with delight as the first thin slip of the new moon gradually waxed to become a full brilliant disc, upon the surface of which it was possible to see the shadowed outlines of meres and mountains with the naked eye.

For some years my father had suffered cataracts in both eyes which had grievously distorted his vision, presenting the world as fractured and indistinct, ghostly duplications taking the stead of wholeness, print dissolving and blurring before his gaze. He was in his seventies when the cataracts were removed, and his vision restored once more to shining completeness. For him, it was though a miracle had taken place, he spoke of it as such, and to look upon him, witnessing the air of lightness about him, the new assuredness of his step, but above all, the clean, clear youthfulness of his eyes, we could believe it to be so.

We bought him a pair of binoculars so that he could look more closely on the moon, and a moon map, so that he could understand what he saw, gifts he had long postponed because he would not have been able to see the moon without a gleaming twin appearing alongside, the features of both muddled and inseperable.

In the back garden he tilted the binoculars upwards, exclaiming with child like enthusiasm at what he was now able to see, moving us to tears at his pleasure, hopeful that the transformation to his sight would be long lived.

During the last days in hospital, just before his death, his eyes had seemed very blue, opened wide in anxiety, the eyes of a frightened child. It was difficult to recall that night in the garden, when hopefulness had embraced us as the light of the rising moon had enveloped the garden, holding us rapt, bound together, for those precious moments invulnerable to the fact of our mortality, our inevitable separation from each other. It is the frantic intensity of his worried eyes that I remember, and which I would have given my life to assauge.