presbyopia

Increasing longsightedness renders my vision imperfect for reading, drawing, writing and playing the piano, but perfect for gazing at the clouds.

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.

spring bulbs

Each afternoon, I visit a local first school, where I help in the classroom. In the Autumn, the children and I planted spring bulbs in deep, soft loam in terracotta pots; crocus, hyacinth, daffodil, the children each choosing a bulb using the brightly coloured packets as their guides. Almost every child wished to plant a hyacinth, or a daffodil, because the bulbs of the hyacinth and the daffodil are bigger and seem more impressive than the tiny, nutty crocus corms. We looked closely at the illustrations on the packets, and I explained to them that the crocus would form a beautiful goblet, that from the modest, wrinkled corm, a satin petalled bloom would emerge as if by magic, like a magician's silk handkerchief pulled from a pocket. Thirty bulbs were planted during the course of the afternoon, the children placing them carefully into finger moulded hollows in the earth, and covering them with a layer of soil, before we watered them , and set the pots on the windowsill.

Throughout the following weeks I tended to them daily, careful that the soil remained moist, as the atmosphere of the classroom during the months of Autumn, Winter and early Spring is very warm and dry. As it was, the bulbs, encouraged no doubt by the warmth of the room, showed spear points of green much before their garden counterparts, and in early February the first crocus opened the petals of it's frail, elegant chalice to the  pale winter sun. I was enchanted, and watched with increasing delight and gratitude as a succession of blooms followed; hyacinths of an intense, smokey blue, rich mauve and snow white crocuses, brilliant daffodils. We enjoyed the display for several weeks before the crocuses collapsed into crumpled  ribbons, the daffodils sagging like damp paper bags, the hyacinths becoming brittle, dark and shrunken.

One afternoon in late March  on entering the classroom, I noticed, with a palpable shock, as though a current of electricity had been passed through my body, that  the still green foliage of the spent bulbs had been cut just above the level of the earth. Bulbs need their leaves to rejuvenate themselves after flowering, for a short period, at least. Far kinder  to allow the leaves to yellow and wither naturally before tidying them away. The sight of the severed greenery caused me a sympathetic jolt of injury that I found difficult to bear.

Later in the afternoon, a child fell in the playground, grazing her hands slightly and bursting into copious weeping. I comforted her, upset at the sight of the torn skin on her palms, removing her to wash them in warm water. Yet, disturbed as I was at the child's mishap, I did not feel the same acute outrage that I felt on seeing the truncated leaves of the bulbs, only an echo of the sense of the pain I had experienced on their behalf, which is a hurt similar to that I feel on seeing a recently felled tree, plants of wall and wayside wrenched up by their roots or broken and flung to the pavement, the wrecked body of an animal or bird hit by a vehicle, lying abandoned on the road or grass verge.

It would seem that I care more for the lives of plants and other animals than for human, although when my beloved partner fell from his bicycle, and badly grazed his forearm, so that I needed to bandage it for protection for days afterwards, the shock of seeing his bloodied, raw flesh was as keen and strong as that which I felt at the sight of the bulbs. Perhaps my reaction depends on the severity of the injury, or perhaps intimacy is the key, and  there is a necessary emotional distance between myself and the children, preserved partly due to my own personal reticence, and partly as a matter of propriety.

clouds and balloons

" The single clouds hanging like balloons."



Roger Deakin   Notes From Walnut Tree Farm Hamish Hamilton Penguin Group 2008

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.

fainthearted

A chasm yawns between thought and deed, between bud and fruit.

I am afraid to begin the three drawings hitherto written of, and find myself trembling on the brink of the abyss, my heart faint within me.

afraid

"'Why are you afraid?' I asked myself, because fear is at the bottom of everything, even love usually rests on fear. 'Why are you afraid, when whatever you do you will die anyway?'"


Lighthousekeeping by Jeanette Winterson. Published by Fourth Estate, Great Britain 2004.