Somebody must be trying to tell me something. Not long ago a was lent by a friend and colleague a volume produced by the Royal Drawing School, entitled Ways of Drawing: artists’ perspectives and practices.* It is a copiously illustrated volume of essays by a wide variety of artists writing about and presenting the results of their very diverse approaches to drawing. It has taken me a long time to get around to reading it, and out recent holiday in Dorset have me a stimulus to get into it.
At first I found myself feeling just a bit persecuted. There was that guilty feeling we all experience when somebody points out ever so gently that there is something we really ought to be doing for our own good, but have persuaded ourselves that to do so is just too much trouble. “Yes: OK: I know I ought to devote more time to drawing, but …..” (Fill in the rest for yourself.) Then there came a kind of artist’s equivalent of the Alcoholics Anonymous moment, during the experience about which I wrote yesterday, of drawing cows. “I admit it. I recognise publicly that I am a lapsed drawer.”
So today I decided I would do something about it, and I put a rather complicated and interesting pot plant on a stool and got stuck in with the pastels. I have to admit that I have been encouraged by the result, which strikes me as fresh and vigorous. My wife likes it too, and in her usually direct and uncompromising manner told me that of late I have been far too preoccupied with “ideas”, and have neglected disgracefully what I ought to have been doing. I would question any necessary opposition between ideas and drawing, but I do take the point.
Although I do have “ideas” for some new work I have recognised that a good deal of preparatory work needs to be done to bring these close to realisation. It does look as if I ought to be heading “back to the drawing board.”
*Edited by Julian Bell, Julia Balchin and Claudia Tobin, Thames & Hudson, 2019.