Drawing day

I’ve just spent the whole day outside drawing. For one reason or another this is something I haven’t done for quite a long time. It has been a very enjoyable day and I realise that I must get back into the habit of taking a sketchbook out with me as I have refreshed my mind, come up with a few ideas and generally reinvigorated myself. Drawing is good therapy!

I sat in one spot with a good friend for four hours and drew, and chatted, and wrote. We were sitting in a slightly elevated position above the marsh between Stiffkey and Morston almost opposite Blakeney point. The tide was out when we arrived and it was high tide when we finally packed up and left. There was plenty of time to take everything in and to notice the changes taking place before my eyes.

These are my drawings which I have interspersed with some of my written ‘noticings’.

Prickly grass on my back

Itchy

Crickets

Grass gently bobbing

Water laps, wind hisses.

Purple sea lavender is smudged across the marsh. It will have faded to brown in a week or two.

The sun comes out, and sand in the distance out by the sea flashes a bright creamy, white.

Boats move gently back and forth on their moorings. Blown one way by the wind and then pushed back again by the incoming tide.

Pipit

Chaucer

Why Knot

LN5 Kings Lynn – Mary Jane

A cobweb is caught in a gorse bush – the wind blows it but it doesn’t break.

Birds like boats take off from the surface of the water.

Light, dark, light, dark

Seagulls fly over and their wings flap light, dark, light, dark. Reflecting fluttering bunting from boats on the marsh.

Birds, high, high up

Tiny dots

flying together like a pepper pot against the clouds

extend and curve out into the blue sky.

Painting

Looking through the catalogue of work that I have made this year I notice that I have done more watercolour paintings than anything else.

Painting is something I enjoy. If the weather is good I will take paints and paper and walk to a place outside; if it is raining, I’ll paint in the studio, from memory.

Painting gives me two things: an exploration of mark making and materials – in this case paint and paper; and it gives me the opportunity to consider something that is becoming increasingly important when I make work – that ambiguous space between an experience and how I may evoke it, either immediately or later. These ideas feed each other as I paint.

A painting comes from my manipulation of materials to exploit their specific properties. How does paint move around paper? What tools should I use to move it around? What marks can I make? How much water should I use? It is a process that is largely intuitive and each time I squeeze paint onto a palette and pick up a paint brush something different happens. What I discover whilst working with these materials feeds the expression of the image that appears on the paper.

These paintings were made in the studio and come from my memory. I find I am increasingly making work from the memory of an experience: the remembered sensation of seeing, of hearing, of touching that constitutes a moment of being in the world. These paintings explore that space between the original experience and how I might evoke it here and now.

I have spoken before about artist Wilhelmina Barns-Graham and her idea of ‘outer sensing and inner seeing’. These paintings are an expression of contemplation and imagination and come from an amalgam of experiences within me: of space, of light, of time, of rhythm. They are the result of the interaction between my inner perceptions, my materials and my hands.

These paintings are done on half a sheet (approx. 56×38 cm)  Bockingford,  300gm, not, watercolour paper.