Category: Blog

We don’t often think of creative practices as movement in the same way we do other activities that mobilise the body but they absolutely are. Taking your pen to the page to write or draw, knitting, sewing, sculpting, all of these involve motor patterns. All of them are forms of physical movement.

When I first started drawing, it was during a time when my mind felt scattered. Despite my best efforts to steer myself elsewhere, I was steeped in anxiety. Drawing became a kind of refuge.

On a neurological level, engaging in activities that coordinate the eyes and hands, especially in rhythmic or patterned ways, literally helps reorganise a scrambled brain.

A study on drawing and doodling from Harvard University notes:

“Spontaneous drawings may also relieve psychological distress, making it easier to attend to things. We like to make sense of our lives by making up coherent stories, but sometimes there are gaps that cannot be filled, no matter how hard we try. Doodles fill these gaps, possibly by activating the brain’s ‘time travel machine,’ allowing it to find lost puzzle pieces of memories, bringing them to the present, and making the picture of our lives more whole again. With this greater sense of self and meaning, we may be able to feel more relaxed and concentrate more.”

Creativity isn’t just expression, it’s regulation.

I’ve come to realize that following my creative impulses and making time for my art actually makes me more available- and more capable- for everything else. Not following those impulses is a deadening of vitality.

Creativity isn’t just a survival act; it’s also an act of thriving

I woke up this morning to so much loveliness, to attempt to capture it in words is like blowing a dandelion clock into the breeze and doing your best to collect all the pieces back again shortly after.

Members of my drawing group had posted many of their things. There’s been sunflowers and periwinkles and thistles of the kind that grow in Canada, a glorious shiny pumpkin that has been sitting majestically in a kitchen far away, a pot plant named after peace, and doodles of a very peaceful dog, stretched out and sleeping on the floor.

And as I uncurled my eyes, I understood the loveliness that someone else had seen and translated through their fingers, in lands very far away, now seen through my own eyes, and I got to imagine the sunflowers blooming and the very particular spot in the garden where the periwinkle might grow.

I was reminded of the funny way my horses try to eat a thistle, and even though we call them a weed, how beautiful they are if we just let them be what they are without any other label, and I felt grateful.

This is the power of art and creating. Not the works of “professionals” who have spent years honing their craft upon the page (which is undoubtedly gorgeous too) , but simple lines and colours of someone who for a few moments paid attention and decided to capture it on the page. And here I was, the other side of the world, smiling first thing in the morning and resolving that very shortly, I shall attempt to do the same.

And then as if my heart could handle any more (hearts are amazing like that, they grow and grow and grow), Sara Santa Clara, who belongs to the periwinkles, wrote in an essay she just posted:

“Jane has a way of talking and telling you everyone can draw that makes you want to believe her and make it so.”

Which made me wonder, at what point did we ever believe the opposite? And in the unbelieving of this, imagine what other loveliness might flow?

Making and creating is magic. It makes changes in the world

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.