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.

drawing practise

With regard to the three drawings written of previously, and as yet only existing in my mind's eye, those of the blue mittens, the red handled skipping rope and the little leather shoes, I find that my internal vision well outstrips my abilities in draughtwomanship. On attempting to make a preparatory drawing of the little leather shoes, my eye is painfully bewildered, and I am unable to perceive the correct proportions, or understand the shapes and their relationship to one another, the interplay of lines that makes up the whole, let alone transfer this compexity of information to the paper. The marks that I make with the pencil seem coarse; I cannot depict the article before my eyes with any degree of accuracy or finesse. Neither can I attempt a more naive rendering, approaching the problem in a similar manner to that in which I approached the drawings of tree, volcano and rainbow.

 Dyspraxia, formerly known as 'clusmsy child syndrome' and with which I was diagnosed somewhat late in life,  causes me to experience difficulty in understanding spatial relationships which may account in part for my refusal to engage with more than one subject in a drawing, instead suspending an image centrally in a sea of white or cream paper, with relationship only to the edges of the paper and thence to the frame. Dyspraxia also affects my fine motor skills and coordination; I find the pencil an unwieldy, although much loved, instrument on attempting to draw with it, and when I write, although managing some fluency and speed, I am often unable to attend to the true shapes of some of the letters, lacking the control to fashion them as forms distinct from one another.

 I cannot altogether ascribe my lack of skill to the condition; I find and have always found, academic drawing difficult, and do not seem to be gifted with the facility to render observed objects accurately or gracefully, particularly the human figure; the same confusion regarding proportion, line and spatial relationships pertains. As noted above, my interior visualisation, that which shapes the drawings in my mind, is far superior to that which I exercise physically when I attempt to draw from observation. There is no fluid transmission from my eye, or my mind's eye, to the paper although when I was engaged in making the drawings of tree, volcano and rainbow, none of these subjects being drawn from life, I experienced a sense of freedom and a measure of ease. I concede that practise would effect an improvement, but I have come to a further realisation; not only is it  imposible for me to draw the little leather shoes in an academic, realistic fashion, I do not wish to. Such a method does not chime with the image I have in my mind. However, I have achieved progress of sorts; on encountering failure where I would have preferred success, I do not engage in self harm, instead coming silently to terms with my deficiencies, and, setting aside materials, begin to consider other possibilities.

For I must find a way of realising the piece of work comprising the blue mittens, the red handled rope and the little leather shoes. If I do wish to draw them after all, I may well decide to try and trace their outlines on the paper from  projected transparencies,  attending to colour and mass afterwards. I might make a photographic piece. I need to set the work adrift in my imagination; forget the three ghostly drawings, or at least not be fettered by them, and apply myself to exploring other means of articulating my ideas. I do not believe it possible to make a drawing of the blue mittens in the manner in which I had first conceived of, on discovering them, and finding the suggestion of a drawing seeded in my mind, therefore I shall wait awhile, and then make many careful transparencies of all three things, the rope, the pair of shoes, and the little mittens. This activity would mark a return to an earlier way of working, but might also suggest the method by which I would find it possible to externalise my inner concerns, thus creating a piece of work which satisfied my vision.