Cocktail Umbrella

My day feels redeemed by this tiny fellow, who so beautifully described how I was feeling. We worked together closely and intently, the tiny parasol and I. The drawing is small - maybe my smallest ever, but, despite flaws, it commands attention amongst the other works on the wall, and I feel much better.

Sore

Today, everything hurts.
I have a full eight hours in the studio, but nothing is working, and I am finding it hard to be philosophical.
The albino leaf has been abandoned - I have already cut up the paper to re-use. The eggs in their little newspaper box are good, but the torn surface of the drawing seems at odds with the smooth surfaces I am trying to describe, and there is nothing to be done about it.
I have started to draw the little cocktail umbrella I found last week at the night market. I watched it for half an hour, as it was buffeted and trampled by the crowd, its shape changing moment to moment. I have always found cocktail umbrellas so enchanting, and there was something poignant and mesmerising about its plight. I rescued it and brought it home.
But my drawing just looks mean and cramped. I will try again.
I am not able to rise above heartbreak, today, either. I have been doing so well! But today my spirit can't emerge from the sorry, bottom-line knowledge that I put all my love on the line, the best and bravest of myself, and I lost.
I am indulging in that timeless, irrational question: why me?
Of course I am. My gut is sore and heavy with the monthly reminder that I am still not a mother. I know the drill. By tomorrow, this cloud will have lifted and I will feel glad again. After all, I am an independent young woman with the world at her feet, right?
I opened at random my book of Hafiz poems, and arrived at two lines overflowing from the previous page.

'Nothing evolves us
Like love'

Well, thank you, Hafiz.
But today I am a cave woman.

Newspaper Nest (in progress)

Barest bones

Any fears of getting too pretty have been assuaged. Today's offering is a mess!
I include it here for the sake of honesty, though I'm wincing a little at the exposure of my clumsiness. Truth be told, I don't know if this one will work out, but I'm excited about it.
It represents forty fast minutes of drawing time - all I had, today, between one thing and another.
I am getting into the habit of 'half-hour starts', when I don't have a lot of studio time (stop me if I've told you this already). Today, for instance, I could have spent my brief opportunity on the dandelion, but I know that the slowest part of a drawing is its final stages. I would be unlikely to have finished it, and it would be harder to feel I'd made any progress at all.
But in half an hour, I can make something where there was nothing, and that is a very significant development!
So I started something new.

Here (let me decode the scribble) is a plane tree leaf, fallen in this premature Autumn onto the glaring concrete surrounding the local mega-chain supermarket. I noticed it because it, too, was starkly white in the searing afternoon sun, and appeared almost to be fashioned out of the path itself. It is a murky orange on its face, but its strange, albino back has the appearance of creased paper, and against a white background, the shadows are all that distinguish it.
The surface of the leaf is a rearing, bucking landscape, full of volumes and hollows, and I struggled, when I began, to reconcile them with preconceived assumptions about what a leaf looks like. I started by drawing it simply as a pattern of light and shade, transcribing the surface information as a camera does. But the sense of body, of presence, eluded me, and I was discouraged by the clumsiness of my attempts.
So I resorted to a more abstract, linear mapping of what I know about the leaf - here the peak of the hill, here the gentle swell, here the sudden decline. It is one of my favourite approaches to a drawing, though often little of it will remain visible in the end. It helps me to grapple with the mystery of presence itself. It is more physical and satisfying, and tracks something more elusive than the fall of light.
It tracks my desire to wrest form out of flatness like a magician.

Roadside Dandelion (in progress)

This little fellow runs dangerously near to cliché, but I am trying to obey the tiny but decisive voice in my head that says 'yes!' to some things and not to others.

It is a voice separate from my rational mind, which has been deeply conditioned to be superstitious of all beauty, but, frankly, has no idea what is beauty and what isn't. The tiny voice has quite a mind of its own. It says 'yes!' to my sandals and 'no!' to my boots. It says 'yes!' to the tiny double-leaf sprout, but sadly, 'no!' to the lovely blue feather I also found on my Emerald adventure. It says 'yes!' to garbage bags - almost always! - but 'no!' to the rags of which I have made so many drawings in the past. The tiny voice changes its mind, too, usually after a drawing has been made. The bamboo boats it insisted on so fervently two years ago, are of no interest, now, though I hold them in nice light and say, 'please?' (because I love them).

My opinionated little friend is therefore my most trusted compass for what to work with, next. If it says, 'oh, that roadside weed is so you, this season,' I will take the advice, because I usually learn why, later on.

So far, my grouchy mistrust of the weed (which I tied gingerly to a pillar in my studio, feeling sure a dog must have pissed on it) has already changed to sheer delight at the jerky abandon of the leaves. And the drawing throws up enough demands and challenges for my rational mind to be appeased.

Double-leaf in Colour

I decided to take the plunge and add colour to the double-leaf sprout.
My, but with what a pounding of heart and sickening of stomach I reached for my watercolours. Inevitability is sometimes a horrible feeling. I suddenly knew I was going to do it, and that there'd be no stopping me, for better or worse. Every subsequent mark was made with my heart in my throat.
I still don't know how I feel about it. The deeply private monotone drawing is gone forever, replaced by this other work, with which I have no choice, now, but to try and be friends!
I think we'll grow to like each other. For the moment we are staring darkly and suspiciously at one another across the room, like two stunned children on the first day at kindergarten.
Well, I, for one, am going to see what I can find up the street for some afternoon tea. It'll be good for me to step back out into the world for a bit.
And I've been a brave girl, this afternoon, so a chocolatey reward is in order.

Double-leaf Sprout (in progress)

I found this infant tree amid the grass at Emerald Lake Park, yesterday. It stung vivid vermilion amid the hardy, green stubble, and I plucked it out without a second thought, so sure was I that it was for me, that I would draw it, and that I would then plant it in my garden, where it would grow to be a strong and lissom maple (for what else could it be?).

Well, I'm drawing it, anyway.

My intention was to work it in colour, and I may bleed some red ink into this. But reds are so fickle and tricky. They can sap all the colour out of a monotone drawing - truly! I think I might do better to make a second version in colour. I'm liking this one so much, as it is.

Taking a short break, today, while my wet and laboured page slowly dried, I leafed through old Rumi with the usual hope of a moment of grace.

Funnily enough, these lines form part of the only poem bookmarked:

"we are the first double-leaf sprout

two inches out of the ground.

We need rain, or we may not grow

more than this."

excerpt from I Ask One More Thing

translation: Coleman Barks

 

On Puffing Billy

A few shots from today's 'Artist's Date' - from Liam, the Rockwellian station-hand (aged 14); to the free-spirited Harmony, trying to grasp at the world as she flew past it.

 

 

At Menzies Creek

There can be no child on Puffing Billy today who is as excited as me. It's twenty years since I last dangled my big feet out over the whizzing wildflowers and blackberries, waving at cars stopped at crossings and gardeners hefting debris onto bonfires.
Half an hour to go before we reach Emerald Lake.
I was sorry to forgo the studio, today; to leave my little jar of flowers in the dark for all these hours.
But I'm taking Puffing Billy to Emerald Lake, all by myself, with a thermos of coffee and a packed lunch, my diary, my novel, my ink and brushes. Could any thought be more glorious?

I snapped this at Menzies Creek station, where I stepped out to stretch my legs. I was struck by the reflection of the little girl in pink. I had no idea, till examining the picture, that the station master was watching...

Whoooooo-ooot!
Departing now for Emerald Lake.

Day Five - Nearly Done

Day Four - Sandals progress

Day Three

It was 5pm before I summoned the courage to begin drawing.
My space had been ready since midday, and I spent the afternoon buying a pot plant and sleeping with my mouth open in my new old chair.

I have promised myself I will do practical tasks where creativity eludes me. I need a way to keep moving in the studio. It is an interesting thing to start fresh with a clear knowledge of my habits and tendencies. Cutting paper down to size is my least favourite - but necessary - studio task. It requires little brain power and virtually no creativity. I organised my tools and set to work, cutting more paper than was immediately necessary, so that I wouldn't meet that stumbling block again for a while. I nailed it all up on the wall, so that spanking white pages stared out at me, innocent and threatening at once. I sat down in my new old chair again.

Julia Cameron says, take care of the quantity and the quality will take care of itself.
I thought of Leonard Cohen claiming he never has any good ideas, but just chips away at things till something is good.

I'm not exactly a stranger to inspiration, but I don't generally work from it directly.
It's funny: when I am away from the studio, or kept from drawing by work or other obstacles, the world is full of beauty, surprise and meaning. Little things open up their secrets and show me fleeting glimpses of a cohesive universe, a pure, wordless understanding of everything, before becoming merely pegs again, or merely shoes, or merely a heron in the suburban wetlands, dishevelled by a sudden gust of wind.
But in the studio, where I must take some responsibility for these revelations, must translate them, redesign them, compose them - the task seems quite beyond me and, disappointed by my futility, the vision ebbs away and I am left with only an indistinct memory, and a slight concern that I may be just a little unhinged. Mostly, I draw pegs or rags, not because they are showing me the world, but because they did once, for a fraction of a second, and I hope to draw it out again.

So, it took a massive effort of will to get out of the chair and begin, yesterday (and no, it's not the chair's fault. I can easily spend hours sitting on a lumpy concrete floor if procrastination demands. The chair just saves me from associated injury). But beginning, in the end, contains its own, other magic. Almost immediately, the object has another interpretation, another existence, even. The drawing, like a newborn, is straight-away irrefutably present and demanding, and has a unique beauty or interest for me that did not exist, even in imagination, before I began.

Pegs (In Progress)

Day One

I have had a pretty good day. Good days at the moment only really come as the result of energy and purpose. I am still in a state of awful surprise over Lewis's leaving, and it strikes most painfuly at this hour, when one out of two nights I'd be on one or other side of his kitchen counter, sharing stories of the day, drinking wine and cracking jokes, with the steady, happy expectation of sleeping with his warm body next to mine all night. I thought I was expecting he might take the option of leaving. We had debated the issue of having children for so long, without much sign of a shift in him. But in reality, I am staggered that he could leave us in mid-flight like that. We were strong. We were - apart from this ever-present question - happy.

I was, anyway.

And yet - there is a part of me that has blossomed since the very day he left. It is a really uncomfortable thing to realise, but my life feels bigger when I am not attached to Lewis. It is not who he is, or how our love is, but the mechanism he has developed, over all his years of living and getting hurt, for quelling a wild, happy possibility as it arises. It's a crippling habit, and I hope he manages to overcome the fear that is its cause. And I need to develop a better resilience to pessimism! But it was a surprise to me, to remember that the habit is not mine, and doesn't come naturally to me. That, almost as soon as he was gone, my life - my dreams - seemed to expand with a snap like a great, bright parachute.
I visited Lewis, the other day, and was surprised to find that I and my great silken canopy did not seem to fit in his house anymore. Already.

And yet, at this hour each night, and later, as I tuck into bed, I have this vertiginous feeling, as though the wind has been knocked out of me and the ground has disappeared from beneath me. It's loss in its raw form, unthought, unrationalised. I just miss him horribly.
But what has changed is my impression that I was, in some way, not good enough for Lewis to choose a life with me. Instead, I think, his life is currently too small, too constrained, to accommodate me. It shouldn't be: he has a glorious parachute scrunched tightly inside him, but he doesn't know what to do with it, yet. I really, really hope he works out how, and that he does it before I get too accustomed to my airborne solitude. I miss him. But I don't miss the shape of my self when I was with him, and this is a revelation.

Today I moved into my new studio. That is to say, I was given the keys to my new studio and, with no car - in particular no Land Rover - I ferried a collection of inks and brushes and rags via bicycle and deposited them in the empty, blank space, where they seemed almost to be sucked into the void in their smallness. I have been psyching myself up for this day - I've known it before - the realisation that prorastination still presides, even when the gates are open. I looked at the space: it is, in its current state, procrastination aside, completely unworkable. It needs flat walls (they are stud walls at present), and a desk. There is nowhere to sit. I knew I could sit there on the lumpy, concrete floor for days, daydreaming and planning and wishing I still had Lewis and his manly know-how and his Land Rover and tools. But I really am determined to live differently in this, my year of art. To say 'yes' to myself, to be an artist without boundaries...

...well, let's not get carried away: an artist without fear of timber yards.

So! I gathered my courage and went directly to the timber yard, and ordered 3 GIANT sheets of plasterboard to use as drawing walls. The guy at the desk was convinced I had no idea what I was doing. I persuaded him that yes, I did want what I said I wanted, and once he understood why partially-clad walls would be adequate for my needs, he helped me patiently with all the things I didn't know, and I think he got a kick out of problem-solving with me. I ordered everything I need to be delivered, and then called on Aroha, who had offered to take me op-shopping for furniture, with her station-wagon. We didn't find everything I needed, but we found the one essential thing: A deep, comfortable, nostalgic armchair, covered in a floral fabric like we had on our couch as little kids. I recognised it straight away as MY chair. I bargained it down to $60, and we gleefully drove it home to the new studio, where it is now waiting in the dark with my little brushes and bottles of ink in an otherwise empty room. And so ends day one. Baby steps.

Tomorrow my plasterboard will be delivered! I have enlisted the help of Jessie and Dad for installing it, and when it is sealed and dry, I will have enough equipment to at least begin something, and a chair to curl up in and mull it all over.