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