somewhere out there

 

Second drawing in the series 'somewhere out there', completed yesterday evening, that is the evening of 25 November 2020. I worked on in artificial light until late in the eveing, taking my time, unhurriedly placing white touches of the pencil on the black paper. Yesterday was especially poignant, as it was the anniversary of my maternal Grandmother's death; she died when I was just twelve years old, but I can remember the day as clearly as though it had been indeed yesterday. Something about the quality of my mother's voice as she took the telephone call alerted me and I knew without being told that the person with whom I had had not an easy relationship had died.I loved her, as I love my mother, both women presented and still present, in the case of my mother, difficult personality traits, as I am sure that I do also.

It would appear that my drawings are about so much more than scatterings of stars in imaginary galaxies; how can I convey the texture of each day, each evening, which seem to me to be intrinsic to each drawing?It may be that the titles for each drawing could communicate something of the feeling tone of the time during which they were made. If the overall title; the title of the series, is 'somewhere out there, there is nothing to prevent me from titling each indivdual drawing within the series., thus taking into account the quality of the light on each particular day, for example. Yesterday was a cool, calm day. The quality of the light was beautiful; silvery gold ; a tranquil sunset closing a tranquil day. My mother and I compare weather notes each day; yesterday I was able to describe the luminous afternoon for her. I refrained from reminding her that it was the anniversary of her own Mother's death, for it would have caused her such pain. Instead I remembered my Grandmother in my own fashion, dating the drawing made that day, with care on the back, holding her in my thoughts as I worked.

Her name was Violet Lanchbury, sister of the composer and ballet conductor, John Lanchbury. She came from a gifted family; her brothers and sisters were clever, but it seems to me  that although gifted intellectually, they were not so in circumstance. They were born just before the outbreak of the First World War; they were adults during the Second World War, adults bringing up families. My Grandmother removed her family to South Yorkshire following the bombing of their London house, during which her beloved goldfish which lived in a tank on the kitchen windowsill were killed; this was her deciding factor. I have pondered upon this over the years since my mother recounted their loss to me. I can visualise the shattered tank on the flagstones, see the beautiful golden fish scattered and mutilated; the image is as sharp and poignant in my mind's eye as though I had been there myself.

I do not believe that my mother has recovered from the traumatic experience of having lived through war years in London, despite her having been evacuated, effectively, by her mother at the age of eight, just two years into the war. My Grandmother spoke little of it to us, her grandchildren; I do not know how much she and my mother talked of it. I only have my mother's recollections and her precious writings to communicate something of the quality of those times. Perhaps the titles for my drawings could reflect something of that.

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.

somewhere out there

 

Not Nepalese Lokta paper this time, but a paper handmade in a small mill in Montreal and obtainable through a London stockist. Old Master 'Crowsnest' is a sooty black and made to a seventeenth century recipe using sisal, cotton offcuts and waste from the fashion industry; an old recipe made modern. The paper has a fine tooth and readily accepts detail, which the Lokta paper does not, so the touching of a needle sharp white pencil point to the surface leaves a minute white mark. These drawings take days to make and the making of them is an absorbing, calming process; I realise that when I first sit down to my task, I am holding my breath, which, after a few marks have been made, I gradually and consciously expel from my lungs with a sense of release. Thus open to the Universe, I can begin. 

I work right up to the edge of the paper, which has four lovely deckled edges, so that the entire sheet of paper is covered with tiny points of light , or stars. My starfields are imaginary; it's just possible that the configurations of stars and star clusters that I draw have their place in the actual heavens. When I am drawing, I think of the little girl that I was, on that evening when my father and I stood and looked up at the star filled canopy above us, and I had my first taste of infinity. The star drawings, which have the collective title,'somewhere out there', and form an ongoing series, are thus dedicated to my father. It is my hope that he would have liked them.

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.

  On rising we were met with a sky swept clean of cloud and brilliant sunshine. Another late shift for my partner, so we settle down to a leisurely morning; I complete the drawing shown above, which I began yesterday evening, shortly after the street lamp over the road had lit, upon which I closed the curtains, enjoying the cosiness of curling up on the settee with my notebook. As the morning advances, ominous cloud builds from the west, marshalled by a brisk breeze; heavy rain falls and once again I am anxious for Minos, who has elected to remain out of doors.

I needn't have worried, later in the afternoon, after my partner has left for his place of work, Minos bounds in, his glossy black coat bone dry, and takes up a seat on the windowsill of the little back bedroom in which I sit to write. The breeze has quieted and the air, although chill has slowed.The birds are silent. Light grey cloud blankets the sky, but the aspect is bright, silvery, as though the sun were just about to break through; a quiet, cool, Autumn afternoon. 

I recall the telephone conversation I enjoyed with my mother at about this time yesterday, when she spoke of her childhood experience of almost levitating amongst the clouds way above her supine body. I remember that I told her of dreams that I have where I do levitate, without fear, indeed, the experience is exhilarating,even if, happening as it does all of a sudden, it takes me by surprise. If you are a child, that sort of experience must be truly terrifying; only later in life does what I termed a transformative experience elevate and yet calm one's spirits. And there is a vast difference between sitting quietly to compose a drawing and lying on one's back in the summer grasses watching the clouds bank and race above you.

My mother and I speak again this afternoon, but I am aware that I am tired; the conversation does not have the flavour and depth of yesterday's. I tell her that I have completed another grid drawing, but today she does not ask about it; she is more interested in our weather and the cat, details of which I happily supply her with. 

During the course of the last few months, I have been able to save a little money; I would like to have a couple of grid drawings framed, although I shall be hard-pressed to choose between them. Sometimes I allow myself the luxury of day dreaming about their hanging in a snowy white gallery, accessible to a wider audience than that they enjoy at present. It is my habit to write on the inside cover at the front and back of the notebook, ideas for colour combinations, notes for possible titles; it seems to me that these notations, written in pencil, have a life of their own-they could accompany the drawings perhaps in some way. Each notebook begins life crisp and new and plump. During the course of my work, as I remove each drawing, it becomes thinner, until empty save for the pages bearing the notations at the front and back of the book. Yesterday the fresh notebook that I had ordered, arrived; such a rush of pleasure did I experience on unwrapping the parcel and discovering within the new notebook.

The above drawing needs to be removed from the current notebook before I can commence a new drawing, which I shall do later this evening, when the lamp is lit and the dusk is come. I am conscious that I am already eagerly anticipating this time, when the business of the day is done and I can relax with my work- and very possibly a black cat, who has not forsaken his domestic self as I had feared, but embraces both his outdoor life and his indoor life in an exemplary fashion. I cannot help but worry about him; it is only three weeks since the death of his brother, and he is an old gentleman.