Lockdown Art

I went early into lockdown, a week before Boris got his finger out of his Brexity bottom and made it national policy. But then I’ve got to admit it wasn’t a particularly difficult decision for me at the time: “Stay in and write, paint and make things,” was an instruction I could more than live with. Having said that, progress on all these fronts was hardly full steam head, because the other ’positive’ aspect of lockdown for someone in my position was that there was a sudden absence of pressure. ‘I’ll start it tomorrow’ was always too easy an option.
But I did produce stuff – my precarious hold on sanity demands it – just not in the quantity I’d anticipated. So the odd piece of paper did get scribbled on, a canvas or two got daubed, I made stuff and even typed the occasional word here and there. What follows is an attempt at chronology. The problem with that is it suggests a systematic approach, derived from a systematic nature. That isn’t how it works. I paint, write and make things in short, intense sessions, breaking off from a drawing, for example, either frustrated, tired or bored and write a couple of paragraphs. Creatively, I’m more butterfly than worker ant, though I do have qualities of both. The ant hill does get completed eventually; I have a horror of not finishing things in fact.

I’d actually just finished a painting when my voluntary isolation began, an oil on canvas of Stephen Flynn, Jude’s great uncle who was killed on The Somme when he was sixteen – I painted it from a black and white photograph. Lockdown meant I couldn’t seek out the old frame I’d fancied for it so my first lockdown act was to make one.

But then what? Judith had no other emotive photographs of exciting relatives; well, maybe she had but surely none with quite the poignancy and pathos of young Stephen’s and my own tendency to think ’done that – time to move on’ came into play too. But what?
Well, there’s plenty stuff out there, and as my sculpture lecturer at art colleges once told us: “you may not have the space or facilities to make sculpture, but you can always draw.” So when sister-in-law Anne gave me a twig which had detached itself from her magnolia tree I wedged it into glass of water with a couple of stones and drew it.

And of course I doodled.
My doodles – by which I mean the semi serious drawings I’ve been passing time filling sketchbooks with in recent years (see Doodles) had been getting a bit predictable pre lockdown and I’d been doing fewer of them. Enter Zoom and a return to real doodling – the casual, mindless scribbling that occupies the bit of your brain that isn’t paying attention to what’s being said . The thing about real doodling is that it is completely absent minded. Consequently, what goes down onto the paper comes straight from the subconscious. What came from mine on this occasion, when Zooming, were squares and rectangles.
“Some subconscious you’ve got there Stu,” I hear you cry. Well squares and rectangles may sound boring to you but they’ve been worming their way into my artwork (via said subconscious) for decades (check out my old artwork on the history page Chapters 7,8 & 9). There’s something about drawing a square freehand; the act itself is slightly mesmeric and result has an organic feel that a ruler drawn shape doesn’t have. The tiny but inevitable imperfections seem to react with the geometric purity of the subject. I like the slight edginess of that and went on to explore it in a charcoal drawing on an A2 sheet of thin, very slightly shiny card which I roughened up with sandpaper.

Back at the proper Zoom meeting doodles, I’d drawn some of the shapes using a Sharpie felt tip pen which gave them a kind of weight. So, away from the meetings, I started drawing them in a sketchbook and working on them in 6B pencil, allowing the lighter pencil marks to emphasise the weight, the graphite’s subtler complexity to interact with the shapes’ simplicity. I still label these slightly more serious drawings ’doodles’; they are, after all spontaneous little drawings, often done in the evening against a background of televised trivia.

Here are a small selection drawn mainly in A5 and A4 sketchbooks:

During the day I needed something more demanding, of both skill and concentration. I first found it in a photograph of our sleeping cat and a drawing technique involving powdered graphite, 6B pencil and various erasers.
A glance at the Digital Drawings page on this site might encourage the belief that I love cats. Not completely; as companions they leave a lot to be desired – but I do like drawing them. I think it’s the combination of the texture rich fur and the large round, deep, reflective, staring eyes, which attracts me. And the attitude. Cats definitely have attitude. I’m not absolutely convinced that they know they have attitude, incidentally, I suspect it’s just a complete lack of empathy and a natural tendency to sit and stare. They don’t have the musculature for subtle facial expression because they don’t need it – they’re not social animals; they don’t even like each other much and only tolerate us for the food and shelter,
All of which is something of a digression since in the image I was translating into graphite there were no eyes visible, and no attitude, just a ball of sleeping fur. But there was lots of that, meaning lots of drawing and the fulfilment of the main lockdown requirement – it would take ages to do.
I do actually enjoy doing this kind of drawing. It’s quite a contrast to the doodle approach, taking intense concentration and care – you can’t touch the paper because the graphite smudges and, it being representational, the marks have got to be in the right place, the right tone, the right quality and so forth. It’s even trickier in charcoal (see below) but in essence the process is the same. I think of it as meditation with feedback (making good marks makes you feel good – well it does me anyway).

But what then? I had a brief dalliance with a bonsai tree which had died and which I built a box around, feeding my intermittent fascination with trees and ther constituent parts (see Trees) and some experiments with a piece of cloth dipped in resin I’d made some weeks earlier (see Connections. )

( I also did other bits of writing on and off during this period. Some of the more entertaining pieces are to found on the Miscellaneous Writing page )

In the meantime, I searched for something more time consuming.
I messed about drawing snakes for a while. I’m not sure why – I like their scaly armoured look I suppose.  The trouble with snakes though is that they’re fairly sinister and malevalant looking creatures and I wasn’t really interested in exploring sinister malevolent.  So for once I abandoned the project unfinished.

I think I must have been getting desperate by this time because I next embarked on a landscape. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, and no doubt too often, I don’t really do landscapes, but this was lockdown, wife Jude said her 98yr old mother would love a painting of the woods as a substitute for walking through them herself and they were, I have to admit, looking quite beautiful in the spring sunshine, so I took the odd photograph, chose one, and started painting. I offer the result without comment.

I suppose it was some kind of catharsis which led me to produce a small tree tableaux in the form of two Hawthorne twigs fixed to a wooden base. There followed a study of it in coloured pencil.

Basically I enjoy things rather than vistas when it comes to rendering them in pencil or paint – I think it’s something to do with having studied sculpture at art college. I should point out that I include people and other living creatures in the things category and prefer to detach them, person or plant, from any kind of background. Paradoxically I’m also conscious that a good proportion of what I draw and paint (people and cats particularly) is done so from photographs and I often tend to see these as paintings of photographs rather than of things. Paradoxical as I say – but then certain types of photography are seen as being nearer sculpture than painting.  Hey, it’s complicated. There’s a lot of weird stuff going on in my old artistic head – that is, after all, why I do all this drawing, painting and other media based introspection.

One example of that other being a different kind of response to my daily walk in the woods.

Going for a walk is something I’ve been doing on a daily basis since my left atrium started fibrillating about a decade or more ago, but pre lockdown these perambulations had often been put to some kind of purpose, like going somewhere. Now walking was for the sake of walking and often over the same route(s). I found myself entering a kind of sympathetic relationship with the environment I passed through, noticing more of the detail each day, particularly in one small area of woodland. I ended up doing a bit of Land Art, the story of which I’ve already documented (see  Art in he Woods).  Here’s a taster:

Another offshoot of this daily perambulation was a charcoal drawing of a large beech tree which I passed everyday (which you may already have seen in the ’trees’ link above). As I’ve already said, charcoal is even trickier to work with than graphite, at least it is in the detailed, controlled way I was using it. Much of the charcoal sits on the surface in powder form and can literally be blown away if you’re not careful. The advantage is that it can also be manipulated with a good deal of subtlety – an area can be lightened with the touch of a finger or, more delicately and precisely, with a clean dry brush (of course it all needs fixing when it’s finished – before even raising it from the horizontal). The subject of this particular charcoal drawing is a magnificent beast of a tree which the drawing doesn’t really do justice to. I used to pass it daily and stop to watch a colony of small wasps entering and exiting a hole in the trunk – until, that is, one of the stripy little bastards stung me on the back of my head. I kept a little more distance after that. Not too long after, following days of heavy rainfall, a good chunk of the nearby hillside slid downwards onto the path below taking several substantial trees with it. My big beech tree wasn’t affected but normal access to it was – the steps up to it were roped off; access denied. I can still get to the tree but it now involves a detour rather than being a feature encountered en route.

And then I received a commission, from Australia of all places. A friend of daughter Becca now lives out there and wanted some paintings of her friend’s baby daughter; the commission, for three paintings, to be completed in time for the child’s 1st birthday some months off. I don’t really like working from other people’s photographs – some of the out of focus badly lit images I been asked to work from in the past have been beyond the pale (wherever that is). But mobile phone cameras are turning everybody into competent photographers these days and the images she sent me weren’t too bad – not perfect but not bad – and I agreed to do the paintings, for a suitable fee.
That took a month or two and was not without struggle but at least I didn’t have to hand them over personally. I hate handing over portraits; am always convinced it’s going to be a tumbleweed moment. You painters of landscapes and fruit don’t know you’re born. I suppose you do experience rejection, when nobody buys your exhibited masterpiece, but they don’t actually tell you so to your face, even in the form of an awkward silence. Anyway, long story short, Becca’s friend in Australia loved the images and the child’s mother, it was later reported, loved the actual framed paintings when the surprise gift was eventually revealed (well she apparently said she did – I wasn’t there, obviously).

After that it was back to the charcoal again and a giant pointing finger. This is another obsession – hands. I do have a recurring fascination with hands, the body parts themselves and the evidence of their activity – which I’ve been intending to write about for some time. But I haven’t yet so you’ll have to make do with the lastest reaction in charcoal.

It was at this point (no pun intended) that nature intervened in the form of a great granddaughter. I wasn’t able to actually visit this little bundle of joy of course but I was able to capture a image of her from a video her father posted on line.

But what next? Well, there was an A3 drawing of a small water loving plant in its own little spherical bottle. That kept me out of trouble for two or three days..

But I really wanted to do something more substantial. Like a proper portrait, as opposed to the head study of little Runa or a random plant.
Pre lockdown, I had been planning to seek permission from one of my relatively new U3A acquaintances to paint his portrait but the pandemic had put paid to that. So I now settled on another family member in the form of my youngest daughter’s fiancé instead.
A combination of the photographs I took, and the practical consideration that his mother would probably want to hang the result on her wall, led me to reduce my ambition, in terms of size at least. The result was a head and shoulders portrait which mum apparently does like. It has a background because it seemed to need one and, between you and me if they hadn’t whisked it away one day because they liked it as it was I suspect I might have taken it down a different path. I will no doubt paint another in the future and follow said path to where I want it to go.

 

As I write, I have another different painting on my easel as yet unfinished.  But, to be honest, I’ve had enough of lockdown now. I want to visit some art galleries.  I want to reconnect with my arty friends, our bridge playing acquaintances at U3A and the philosophy ones too.

In the end you need people.