Well: I sincerely hope so. That’s one way of describing what I am up to these days. The current virus panic has, in effect, given me a gift of two extra days per week, when you consider all of the regular activities in which I usually engage, but which have been cancelled for the time being. Even given the fact that I am trying to keep the yoga going on a self-help basis, instead of attending a class, I still find that there is a conspicuous easing of any sense of the pressure of time.
Given these circumstances it is a fortunate coincidence that I am attempting a project of a kind quite different from my usual approach to art, both with respect to its content and the medium in which I’m working. I think I have mentioned before in this blog that I have been inspired to think about a group of old English customs relating largely to the traditional “mummers’ plays”. They have set me reflecting on various aspects of English national identity, differentiating important elements of this from the strident “jingoism” which was evident in the campaign over British membership of the EU. As things stand at present I have a group of eight drawings in various stages of completion in which I play with images drawn from these traditional materials.
The other aspect of the novelty of the project is the fact that I am working with pen and ink, both in order to draw the figures and to link these with short passages of text taken from the scripts of the mummers’ plays. This is a medium with which I am almost totally unfamiliar, and it is turning out to be a challenge not only from the point of view of how the materials are to be handled, but (possibly more significantly) from the standpoint of the degree of patience it demands of me. On two occasions, for example, I have found myself compelled to abandon drawings I thought were almost complete, because there were technical errors with which I was dissatisfied.
I’m finding it a completely worthwhile exercise, but rather challenging. Some parts of the project still present obstacles about which I have hardly begun to think …. especially the question of how to present the finished product. Given the fact that I am, for the most part, “confined to barracks” with no shortage of time and no prospect in sight of things changing, I believe that the idea has been a godsend as a way of protecting my sanity.