Recently I injured my back doing some excessively enthusiastic gardening, and consequently I’ve been looking for activities that will allow me to rest it. So this evening I decided to have a go at the exercise (mentioned recently in a blog) recommended to us by the tutor whose life-drawing sessions I attend at the Ilkley Art School. This involves doing a succession of quick-fire drawings from film/TV. I sat down in front of the TV, with the control device to hand, and used the pause button to isolate frames showing interesting heads. I began with the recommended 30 seconds for each, and ended by permitting myself about 5 minutes.
It happened to be a news broadcast item dealing with the way in which our National Health Service is coping with the abnormal demands made by the current pandemic. The subjects I chose varied from regular nurses and doctors, through a person whose specific task is to sit with the dying and relay messages to them from their families who are currently denied access, on through an academic specialist in epidemiology and ending with a journalist. The experience certainly highlighted one thing, and that is the expressiveness of the human face, which I found as moving as the things they were saying. I will certainly be trying this exercise again.
Only afterwards did it register with me that in a life-drawing experience the aim of the occasion is to attend to the bodily form of the subject. What a different experience that is from focussing solely on the face.
Another way I have found to keep myself still and relaxed is to do a jigsaw puzzle. My wife has found an interesting one of 1,000 pieces, which is keeping us occupied. The subject is the packaging of a huge range of brands of ordinary household goods and foods from about the late ‘fifties at a guess. Two things have really registered with me. The first is the way in which a huge diversity of brands have now been absorbed by big national and international corporations. The second is the realisation that in my childhood custard occupied an astonishingly important place in the diet of the ordinary English family. Bearing in mind the interest I expressed yesterday in “Englishness” perhaps I ought to find a place in there for custard.
While I’m on the subject of Englishness, tonight is the night of the week on which people come out of their houses at 8.00 pm. and applaud the emergency workers (especially in the health service) to whom we are so indebted these days. Approval is become more and more diverse in its expression, and now includes bells and fireworks. Crazy, but fun.