somewhere out there

 

A more meditative, measured approach; a better drawing.I took time over this drawing, was not swept along by the urge to finish, thought carefully about where upon the paper I placed each star, began by drawing the most tiny; just pin points of white to denote the tinest of stars. Fewer stars, a more believable drawing. Before I began the drawing, I sat with the piece of sooty black paper upon my drawing board, and just looked and thought. Slow drawing is more conducive to the drawing's success, and is calming for me at this time of international crisis. I am, as I wrote in an earlier post, conscious of the precious photographs behind me, and the nearness of the beautiful piano, which has remained silent for the last few days; I have not had the concentration or the will to practise. Drawing and practising the piano both require patience, but the activities are very different. Perhaps this afternoon, a still, pale afternoon in late November will be the afternoon when I resume my study of the Satie. 

I am aware of persistent low mood, which has no doubt affected my will to practise, and is affecting my will to draw; it is difficult to summon the necessary motivation. It is , however useful to experience inactivity sometimes; I have researched an artist whose work I have found that I hold in high regard; her name is Frances Richardson, and her drawings are beautiful; spare graphite pencil drawings of repeated noughts and crosses in geometric configurations. Whilst looking at images of her work, I remembered drawings of my own which prefigured the recent starfield drawings; drawings of imaginary constellations drawn in grey and black on a neutrally toned paper made by the same mill as the mill that makes the black Crowsnest. The drawings sought to represent the configurations of stars as they might appear on a star chart, or map; I looked at them with a sense of how I might remake them, make fresh drawings with more attention paid to the placing of the tiny black or grey discs denoting the stars. I have looked at star atlases, and stars are often represented in this way. 

At present a new starfield drawing lies upon the drawing board; as before I am paying great attention to it, so that the act of making the drawing is extremely slow paced and the concentration required is considerable. It feels better to draw like this, as though I were really drawing, rather than just dotting a piece of black paper with little white discs, far too many and appearing, on close inspection to be exactly that. Such a long time it takes to hone and mature one's craft;but I feel that I have learned an immeasurable amount during the passage of the last few days, it has been a reflective period.

Does drawing lift one's mood, or does one require a more elevated mood in order to enable one to draw? I suspect that both conditions come into play. Certainly, when I apply myself to my craft, after a while I experience a lessening of the debilitating effects of depression or lowered mood, although when I am at my lowest, the capacity to draw is lost to me completely. At present, then, I am able to place white marks on black paper, evalutae, meditate and reflect, although I admit that these processes are slowed, as though I were caught up in one of those dreams in which all mobility is slowed, or impossible, like trying to run underwater. But I don't wish to hurry over the drawing, my slowness is deliberation; it is the act of sitting down to the drawing which is the most difficult at the moment.

I know that my father is smiling at me; each time I turn around he is there, he looks over my shoulder at the drawings. My drawing board lies upon the table, the window is to my left, this afternoon, tranquil light filters through the branches of the Cotoeaster, which still bears a few Autumn gold leaves. The piano is but an arm's length from me, I am secure within the narrow confines of my working space; I could not wish for a better studio. 

Eager for the delivery of newly ordered paper, I wait impatiently for post-none today, maybe tomorrow! I know that the paper, a fresh consignment of Old Master Crowsnest , is on it's way; a question hovers in my mind, do I go ahead and order another paper from the Old Master range? 'Frobisher' is pale, off white and would perhaps be perfect for the star atlas drawings. It is pleasurable to think on them; I'll bide my time before ordering, and perhaps experiment a little on paper less beautiful and expensive.

It is now late afternoon,, the days are short and still shortening as we turn towards the December ; the garden is in shadow, in just half an hour dusk will have descended and I shall close the curtains against the darkness. I must needs repair to my place of work and continue with my drawing whilst there is still light in the sky. Natural light is perfect to draw by, electric less so, but imagine how difficult drawing would have been by candlelight. Whilst daylight prevails, albeit the nild light of late afternoon, I shall take myself to my waiting work.

Remnants

 

More remnant drawings, made on Nepalese Lokta paper, a very different animal to the Old Master Crowsnest that I wrote of in the previous post. This paper is fine, soft and tissuey; I can rub, and indeed do, coloured pencil sharpenings into the surface in a manner impossible with the Old Master. The paper has a slight velvet sheen, and is fragile, so that applying a moistened pencil point to the surface removes some of the paper; this does not happen with the Old Master. I love both papers and take pleasure in the differing techniques available to me when I use them.

The drawings above were made in a flurry of activity over the course of just a couple of days; in that respect they are very different to the starfield drawings which each take several days to complete. It is helpful to engage in different ways of working, although I was very distrustful of this way of going on at first. 

I work at the end of the long room downstairs, at the table by the window. Behind me is the piano and on the wall above the piano, the two photographs that I wrote of in an earlier post, that of my father, and that of the three kittens at the lodge in Hampshire. Each day I sit at my drawing board and work, taking comfort from knowing that the piano is but an arm's length away. A friend sent me a copy of Eric Satie's Gymnopedie for my recent birthday, which I am in the process of learning; the music lies open on the piano. Somehow, the delicate, spare compositions complement my work and practice. It pleases me to think that my father and the kittens are close by as I practise and draw.

stars

As suddenly as it had imposed itself upon me, the will to make drawings upon the squared paper of my notebook vanished, leaving me high and dry, as it were, without direction or motivation. I pitch and yaw like a rudderless vessel embroiled in high seas with little hope of gaining safe harbourage; indeed have more or less abandoned hope with regard to ever attaining a stable state in terms of my relationship to my work. 

Instead of drawing in my notebook, and in my ever present desire to write and to write well, I read, devouring Anne Truitt's autobiography, and W G Sebald's Vertigo, from which I shall herewith quote a passage:

...."Peter did not come down from his observation post for weeks. It was said that he spent a large part of the first years of the war up there, sleeping by day and watching the stars by night, drawing the constellations on large deep blue sheets of card, or alternatively perforating them by means of bradawls of varying sizes so that, when he attached the sheets to the wooden frames of his glasshouse, he could actually enjoy the illusion, as in a planetarium, that the star-lit heavens were vaulted above his head." 

I have yet to draw the actual constellations as they appear in the night sky, and, not having recourse to an observatory, shall have to use found illustrations for the purpose. Instead, I strew sheets of black, Nepalese paper with fields of stars in imaginary configurations, delighting in subtle inclusions or imperfections in the body of the paper which sometimes appear like myriad infinitessimal groups of stars at great distances from the stars which I draw with white pencils. 

The process of making small white marks upon the jet surface of the beautiful, fragile paper is all absorbing; I deliberately avoid analysing why I choose to make drawings such as these, I do not wonder about their reception, I just draw. Each morning I find  Minos, who has now adapted his outdoor life to include the domain of the house, sprawled across my drawing board, where he has taken to resting; my first task of the day is to brush with care the cat hairs from the surface of the paper. He has lost weight with age, his supine body looks so defenceless whilst he is sleeping, that I do not have the heart to move him, instead I draw on as much of the paper that is available to me before he gets up of his own accord and proceeds with his singular business of the day. I find that with Silas's death, my bond with Minos is ever stronger; I am conscious of the fragility of his little life and of my own mortality, although the despair that overtook me during the days following Silas's death has somewhat dissipated. 

Yesterday morning, up early, and having to go outside to move the waste bins into the street for emptying, I stood for a moment, my face upturned to the bowl of the sky. The West was yet ultramarine, the firmament to the East banded subtlely with palest lemon; the sun had still to broach the horizon. The stars were out, two heavenly bodies among them shining with such vigour that I supposed them to be planets; it was so beautiful a sight that I found myself upon the verge of tears. It has ever been thus; as a child I would spend lengthy stretches of time watching the stars by night, the clouds by day, although I never experienced a moment of near levitation as did my mother. Towards mid August each year, my partner and I journey by car on a clear night to Salisbury Plain, not a great distance from the market town of Frome where we currently reside, and watch for 'shooting stars', as the Earth passes through the seasonal meteor shower of the Perseids.

My piano lessons with Mrs Hilda H Price used to be on a Wednesday evening; my father and I would take the bus into the town and walk the remaining distance to her house. One evening is set fast in my memory, it may have been Autumn, it may have been early in the year; that much I do not remember, I do remember the profound frost that edged the fallen beech leaves with glittering rime and thickly coated the pavements beneath our feet. Above our heads the vault  of the heavens was ablaze with a multitude of stars and seemed to my childish eyes to extend forever and ever. What passed between us by way of conversation I no longer remember; I must have only been very young, but the image of the jewelled bedecked reaches of the sky, the reassuring warmth of my father's hand holding my own remain deeply imprinted upon my memory. I cannot ask my father whether it is the same for him, cannot convey to him how much that time spent alone with him meant to me, how, many years later as a deeply frightened adult I took comfort in the clasp of his hand over mine, but when the night sky above me is crammed with stars, and the air is honed keen with frost, I think of him.

today's drawing

 It had been my intention to curl up on the settee yesterday evening, when the street lamp had lit, with my notebook of gridded paper to make a drawing therein, but when the hour presented itself, the street lamp glowing beyond the window, my notebook to hand, I could not muster the enthusiasm, or the will. My partner was working a late shift; I knew that he would not return to the house until after ten pm, the evening stretched ahead, my inclination to work was absent.

Instead of drawing, I found myself seated at the piano, which I had not touched all day. Lifting the lid of my beautiful piano is always a joy; each night, before I retire, I close the lid, each day that comes I open it, if only to see the lovely word Knight emblazoned just above the keyboard in elegant gold letters. A photographic portrait of my father hangs on the wall just to the right of the piano; it depicts my father at home in his garden. I remember taking the photograph in the Autumn before he died, nine years ago. The piano had been his possession, chosen from a showroom of pianos for it's bright, clean sound. To my father's acute ear, all the other pianos seemed 'woolly'; 'Knight' had and still has a voice that resonates like a crystal bell, a clear, penetrating yet melodious voice.Knight was the piano that I learned to play on, and has been a family member since the late 1960s.

It comforts me to see my father's smiling face; his kindly eyes meeting mine as it were; I feel his presence when I am playing, indeed he is never very far away, catching up with me when I am out walking, entering my dreams at night.

Just above the piano there hangs another photograph- of the three kittens, Minos, Silas and Mimas, taken by my partner shortly after we discovered that there was a litter of kittens sharing our estate at the lodge.These two portraits are precious to me, as is the lovely piano; when I sit down to play, I feel as though I am embraced, the world takes on a more stable aspect, even though most of  the characters portrayed in the photographs are gone, as indeed is our life at the lodge in Hampshire.Until hanging the photograph of my father beside the piano, and then the photograph of the kittens above, I had thought that photographs were rather melancholy, they evoked pain, the pain of loss, for the moment that is caught on camera passes with the blink of an eye, the click of the shutter, is lost forever, constitutes a small death.I shall never again hear my father's voice, with it's soft Sussex burr, his smiling eyes shall never smile upon me again, but I have the photograph, I remember how the skin crinkled around his eyes when he smiled at me on that balmy Autumn afternoon in the garden, where we had sat, my mother, my father and myself to take tea after our labours, which is when the photographic image of him was captured.

In the evening, then, yesterday evening, I played the piano, Chopin; although most of the preludes are beyond my scope as a pianist, there are some that I feel I may be able to learn, and so in my solitude, I opened the book at number Prelude number 2 and began to practise. Number 2 is, like number 20, most affecting, difficult to play effectively, and I am not sure about the use of the pedal- I need advice. Perhaps the time has come for piano lessons. I remember Mrs Hilda H Price ( I always wondered what the second H stood for) who taught me from the age of seven until I was thirteen, she told me that I would never make a concert pianist, but that I was a born teacher- how could she know? Yet she proved to be mistaken in that assertion, for I cannot teach; I seem to have no ability for that vocation. I had once hoped that I could support my work by teaching, indeed once had a passion to teach , but my life has taken a different turn. 

This morning, a fine, bright, blowy morning, with the wind gusting determinedly from the North, I take myself in hand, so to speak, and begin the drawing shown above. It belongs firmly with those preceding it; I seem to be working as is customary, on a long series of drawings with like palette. I remain at a loss for a title; whilst the words 'safe' and 'longing' were prevalent in my mind when I began the series, they have disappeared; maybe when I group the drawings together and see them all as part of a greater whole, a title will arise in my thoughts. Titling the 'grid drawings is one of my pleasures; as noted before, I often write titles in the front of the notebook so that I do not forget them. This evening, and another late shift for my partner- do I play the piano, or do I draw? As yet I am undecided, but the choice before me is far from onerous, I am thankful to be in the position to make it.

lunar

One of a series of twenty eight drawings documenting the phases of the moon; this drawing is round about half way. I began working on this series in the latter part of 2017, as far as I remember; I did not date them, only numbered them.

My partner found a moon calendar for the month of February 2011, the month of my father's death. My father loved the moon, although during his last days he found it's presence in the sky less of a comfort than had hitherto been the case.

This series is not taken from that calender, but I do have a copy, and fully intend to make another series of the phases of the moon using it for reference and dedicating the series to my father.

These drawings are made on black Lokta paper, as are the stardust drawings. It is soft and thin, only 30gsm. It often has inclusions of coloured threads and is textured, as may be seen from the photograph. It is irregular in size with four delicate deckle edges, being made completely by hand. I love it, love the jet sheen of the surface, it's fragility, it's inconsistencies, love the knowledge that it is a sustainable, indeed under utilised, source of material, and that it's production provides employment for otherwise extremely poor Nepalese women.

gunpowder

At the bottom of my mother's garden, undaunted by heavy rain, my sister builds a monumental bonfire from the trimmings and prunings amassed during the last few months. It is the beginning of November, and the family have gathered in commemoration of the date, to loose fireworks into the dark and streaming night, to huddle in talkative groups by the warmth of the fire, afterwards to repair to the house for a traditional 'bonfire supper'.

When my sister is satisfied that despite the downpour, the fire is quick and fierce, the rest of us assemble beneath a shelter tented over the washing line, and my mother, as excited as a small child, opens the gaudily decorated box of fireworks residing on the garden table, with much ceremony. We prevail upon her to be the first to choose from the promising array, and thus follows a succession of other, brilliant, starry choices, wreathing the drenched air with  bitter scented gunpowder smoke, throwing fantastical shadows of the old apple trees across the lawns, drawing shouts and applause, gasps and exclamation.

All the while, my sister tends the bright pyre at the bottom of the garden, her face and figure ruddied by the fiery glow; Hestia incarnate, devoted to the hearth and heart of family, staunch, tender, passionate.

After the fleeting glories of the fireworks are spent, the rain eased, the tent dismantled, and the family returned to the house, I join my sister by the dwindling embers, and find her in reflective mood, her usual vigorous animation of visage softened and quieted. She tells me that her self appointed task of setting the fire, and tending the blaze on this night always brings our father to mind. She says that she is certain, as at no other time, of his presence, that in the velvet shadow at her shoulder he is standing, clad in the old  overalls and the little blue cotton hat he wore for gardening, watching over her, watching over us all.

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.

paper plane

Above my head, suspended from the bedroom ceiling by a length of black cotton, and a brass headed drawing pin, there swings a polystyrene model aeroplane, much faded by the sun, crafted by my youngest nephew from a kit, when he was a little boy. I am visiting my mother, and have chosen to sleep in the back of the house, in the bedroom once used by one of my sisters, and now designated the room of her son when he comes to stay. I awaken very early, to a pearlescent morning, pale light seeping through the summer curtains, and casting a fragile shadow of the aeroplane on the ceiling, a shadow tracing each delicate manoevre of the plane as it turns slowly in the current of air drifting through the open window. Unable to return to sleep, I lay and watch the subtle pirouetting, captivated, and then moved by a sudden impulse to photograph the eccentric craft and it's attendant shade, although I have at my disposal only a tiny digital camera.

Across the landing, a few steps away, the door remains closed upon the room in which my father slept during the latter years of his life, a room quiet and pleasing of aspect, that, as the eldest daughter of the house, was originally my own, and in which, after I had finally left home, in the tranquility of the back of the house, he found peace and security. The wardrobe still contains my father's clothes, most poignantly his homely, plaid dressing gown, and the tweed jacket he was wearing on admittance to hospital after having suffered the stroke that paralysed the lefthand side of his body.

When I visit my mother, I take pains to open the curtains of this closed room in the morning, perhaps opening the fanlight if the day promises to be warm, drawing the curtains again against the coming of night, and shutting the window. The room is not intended as a shrine; it is simply that my mother cannot bear to remove the possessions that speak so powerfully of my father's presence; his hairbrushes, watch, and spectacles, the  knitted garments contained within the chest of drawers,  his jackets, shirts and overcoats hanging neatly in the wardrobe.

Longing for the sound of his voice, the generous, delighted smile with which he greeted us, the gentle pressure of his hand upon our head or shoulder, as though we his daughters were still tender children, I often pause whilst in the room, to open the wardrobe door, taking care that the sound does not reach my mother, to touch the clothes that he inhabited, lay my cheek against the reminiscent roughness of woollen cloth, draw in the lingering scent of his skin, his hair, until either comforted, or overwhelmed by an unassuagable grief, I close the wardrobe, and steal from the room on tiptoe.

I once asked my father if he could make paper aeroplanes, knowing that, as a child, he had created little models from balsa and thread, which he hung from the ceiling of his bedroom, much as did his grandson generations later. We were travelling together on a train bound for a London terminus at the time of my question, leaving him small scope for demonstrating his skill, and would soon part company, myself to journey onwards to Scotland, and he returning home to Hampshire, but a day or so later, a manilla envelope addressed to me in my father's fine, rhythmic italic, arrived by post, bearing within an elegant aeroplane fashioned from a sheet of manuscript paper. I have it still.

inaudible frequency

My father wondered whether the minute silken filaments spun by spiders, strung from twig to twig in the apple trees, and hammocked between blades of grass in the lawns, were like tiny aeolian harps, each vibrating  to a frequency beyond human register. Now, every time I see a spider's web quivering in the wind, I recall his words, and imagine the entire garden resonating in a symphony of sound that I shall forever be unable to hear.

the scent of daffodils

In the dim brown quiet of November, I plant close on three hundred daffodil bulbs in the long flowerbeds of my mother's front garden, sinking the point of the trowel deep into the stubborn, flinty soil, placing each paper jacketed bulb carefully into a funnel of damp earth at trowel's depth, trying for the engineer's neatness with which my father  had always planted them, yet straying eccentrically from the mathematical regularity which he attained.

I remember my father, crouched over the  chill ground as I crouch now, handling the plump, dry, rustling bulbs tenderly, working with a rhythm acquired over a life time of planting bulbs, bright annuals, fragrant wallflowers, elegant foxgloves, reassuringly steady. It is only when he stands, pausing from his labours, that one recognises the weariness of old age, the reluctance of his limbs to perform the task he has set for them, and only then that a shaft of disquiet penetrates one's mind, hitherto lulled into security by the easy cadence of his actions.

I find that I am suddenly blinded by the tears called forth by my remembrance, scalding tears  that fall upon my hands, and cause me to cease in my endeavour, overwhelmed by an intensity of grief, muddied, chilled, exhausted.

Months later, the daffodils stand tall and brilliant in the long flowerbeds, legions of golden trumpeters proclaiming the arrival of the yellow season in all it's cool glory.When I come again to visit, my mother fills a vase with them, and places it in my room, where at night their cold, honeyed scent  perfumes the air, recalls to mind the image of my father, meticulous, stoop shouldered  over the dank, leaf littered soil of Autumn, entrusting the delicate globes of the bulbs to the darkness below ground, confident that with theearth's turning their nascent brilliance would come as a benediction and a vital affirmation of the cycle by which we all are bound.

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.