For most of my life, I’ve understood myself as a wordy person and then when I also realized I was a drawing person too, a few things were revealed to me that putting words down on the page had never shown. For instance:
Last night, I sat down to paint and draw a glorious bunch of flowers that I had seen at my local café earlier that day. As it happens, I don’t usually find myself in such luxurious positions on weekday, but our car had broken down the week prior (the delights!) and now two of us were required to go and pick it up from car hospital.
On the way back, the lure of cake was overwhelming and so both Giles and I felt obligated to stop and eat as much lemon drizzle cake with cream as possible within the 20-minute window afforded to us. This has nothing to do with the purpose of writing what I’m sharing here except to highlight the fact that cake is always relevant.
Anyway: Sat around the kitchen table last night with a puppy chewing on my trouser leg, the boys animated shrieks ringing in my ears, I decided to paint the flowers I’d seen earlier (part of a visual journaling practice I commit to every day).
When I first started drawing and painting, what I made was quite meticulous and detailed, but of late, I’ve noticed myself move into a wild experimentation phase. This permission slip I’ve given myself to play has come, in part, from watching so many other drawing and painting people draw and paint and seeing them go through the “ugly phase” of their art.
“Christ alive,” I say to myself sometimes, when I see their pre-pubescent piece turn into a supermodel.
“Wot a miracle”.
A process which has clearly planted something in my brain. Because now I also allow the same thing to happen to me.
Last night, when painting, I declared prophetically to my family, “the trick is not to quit too early”.
And it’s true. Most of the time, it’s just a matter of continuing.
In visual art, this is so much more obvious- at least to me- than work involved to language. Perhaps it’s because language is tied to school, perhaps we are just so familiar with it that the lessons it shows us aren’t so clear… who knows.
But drawing and painting have showed me that to create anything I like, I have to keep going through the ugly bits, a lesson that carries over to every other part of my life.
All that to say: here are the said flowers.
From a drawing and wordy person’s heart to you.
