“A lot of this writing, it’s just what comes out. When something bubbles up and it either catches my eye or it amuses me or, if I’m really lucky, it moves me – I keep those things. I don’t have to question them any further. There’s already something about them that means they’re worth keeping. I don’t really analyse every speck of a song: if it feels right, I leave it because it feels right.” Paul Simon
It can be interesting to hear what creative people in other fields say about their work. This quote from Paul Simon touched me. I liked the idea that something – a phrase, a subject perhaps – catches your mind’s eye and becomes authorised, so to speak, for later use. It needs no further processing because you’ve already decided that you want to use it, that it’s fit for purpose.
“Even though [my] notebooks are full of meaningless words, there are always little bits in there that in time begin to rise off the page. It’s like those classic spy movies where someone is trying to break a code. They’re staring at random numbers or letters that seem to mean nothing and then suddenly something appears as if by magic out of the mess. With songwriting…what happens is that [ideas] suddenly present themselves, rise from the page and begin to hold hands. Not all at once necessarily, but quite rapidly, and then you start to get creative momentum, a kind of collecting together of information that moves forward towards the basic framing of a song, That’s the thrilling part. It’s really the best part.” Nick Cave
In Faith, Hope and Carnage, Nick Cave talks eloquently to Sean O’Hagan about his religious faith, the tragic deaths of two of his sons, life on the road in a rock band, and – in this excerpt – the creative process. His description of ideas rising from the page and beginning to hold hands will be something that we all can recognise whatever form our creativity might take: that moment during the act of creating when suddenly things are going well – the words flow, the notes gel, the brushstrokes form into an image.
What’s intriguing about hearing or reading the thoughts of artists from other disciplines is how their stories can inform our own practice even if the medium is very different. Last year, my partner and I visited the Dingle Lit festival where she, an abstract painter, found herself inspired and moved by hearing authors such as Max Porter and John Banville – both novelists – speak about their work. Issues they encountered with inspiration mirrored her own. It’s less the type of work that matters in this cross-fertilisation than the map that informs the journey.
Social media is awash with snippets of wisdom that are intended to readjust your thinking, your outlook, even your life. “People are afraid of those who know themselves”, for example, or “Life doesn’t give you the people you want but the people you need.” If you find these phrases helpful – fine. However, nothing, I’d suggest, beats a flow of ideas rather than a phrase plucked out of the ether. So hearing Paul Simon talking at length about his songwriting process and the inspiration behind those familiar hits is more rewarding for having context. Equally, I would urge you to seek out a copy of Nick Cave’s book, simply to hear an eloquent man talking about the defining issues in his life and art, and to witness his ideas developing as he explores.
We all struggle with similar issues. Take the blank page, for example. There are any number of exercises you can do to overcome the fear of starting something. Art teachers, life coaches, and psychologists will walk you through their preferred steps to fill that white sheet with notes, words, marks. Yet how much more encouraging it is to hear Nick Cave struggling with his notebook full of nonsense or Paul Simon filing away things that move him or make him laugh for later use like a mood board in his head.
Let me leave you with a quote from another book that, like the Nick Cave, was given to me as a gift. Towards the end of “Every Good Boy Does Fine: A Love Story in Music Lessons” by pianist Jeremy Denk, he writes about a particularly annoying period of practice:
“Occasionally, I felt I would rather be crucified while listening to Donald Trump read Dante aloud than practice the piano another minute. But each day, I found more in the music, or at least not less: a stubborn value that wouldn’t vanish.”
Isn’t that what we seek in whatever artform we practice: the stubborn value that won’t vanish? I’d say so, whatever form it might take.
Lost (30 cms x 30 cms, ink and coloured pencil, 2023)
How I hate January with its post-Christmas comedown, its grey skies of piddling rain, endless newspaper articles about ‘new year, new you’, veganuary, and giving up drinking. Giving up? Without gin I’d never make it to February 1st.
So let me infuse your January with a little bit of cheerful whimsy. As autumn turns to winter each year, a group of illustrators on Instagram initiate something called Folktale Week. For those of you who eschew Instagram because it’s another Zuckerberg owned thing that will steal your soul (I do understand), allow me to share some of my own contributions to that – for illustrators – engaging and stimulating challenge.
We start with the prompt, Lost (above). There are many lost things in folk tales – lost rings, lost books, lost daughters – but nothing as scary as being a child lost in the forest. Our babes in the wood, apprehensive as night falls, are innocent of the dangers that await them. If only the owl could warn them what is to come… I love drawing stylised winter trees, and was thrilled when someone on Instagram pointed out that the branches looked like a maze, which was my intention.
Sleep (30 cms x 30 cms, ink and coloured pencil, 2023)
For the prompt, ‘Sleep’, I chose the legend of the Sandman. A well-known figure in folklore, the 19th century German tale by E.T.A. Hoffman has him throwing sand in wakeful children’s eyes, causing their eyes to fall out.
So I decided to illustrate Hans Christian Anderson’s more benign version, where the Sandman sprinkles magic dust in children’s eyes and tells them stories to lull them to sleep. He also carries two umbrellas to hold over them: one with pictures inside to provoke sweet dreams for good children, and another that is blank inside if the child has been naughty. No-one’s eyes drop out in the Danish version.
Underground (20 cms x 20 cms, ink and coloured pencil, 2023)
The prompt, Underground, had me looking at Knockers (Cornwall) or Coblynaus (Wales). These are subterranean, troll-like creatures, about 40 cms tall, dressed in archaic miners’ clothes. They are benign if rather mischievous, guiding miners to the richest seams of metal or coal, but stealing their tools or even their sandwiches from their lunchboxes if they weren’t careful.
If you would like to see the rest of the prompts, simply click here. You don’t have to register and you can get away at any time.
I hope this has brought a little light to your cold winter’s day if you’re suffering with me here in the northern hemisphere. As I write, Storm Henk is raging outside my window: we have been warned to fasten down our bins and garden furniture, transport is in disarray, and one man has been killed by a falling tree. Why does it have a Dutch name? Well, despite the idiocy of Brexit, we in Britain name our storms along with the Irish and Dutch meteorological offices, and everyone gets a stab at naming a storm or two.
Whatever it’s called, it’s still cold, wet, and windy (but it’ll soon be Spring).
Naked Santas II (30 cms x 30 cms; ink and coloured pencil; 2023)
Announcing the An Evening With Fleetwood Mac tour in 2018, the late Christine McVie said it could be the band’s last: “The tour is supposed to be a farewell tour, but you take farewell tours one at a time.”
The same could be said of farewells generally. In my previous post, I implied that I was going to wind down this blog. However I had such a warm reaction – both here in the comments section and privately by e-mail – that I’ve decided to carry on for a while yet. Thank you for all your kind, encouraging remarks.
Talking about music, in the UK there’s a Twitter (does anyone call it X?) based challenge known as Whamaggedon. The idea is, as you go from supermarket to department store doing your Christmas shopping, to get as far into December as you can without hearing Wham’s 1984 hit, Last Christmas. It is surprisingly difficult, as the organiser of this challenge, @pandamoanimum, discovered when she was Whammed on day 3. The problem is that most shops in the UK seem to use a collection called Now That’s What I Call Christmas, which leads off with the Wham song, followed by others equally irritating such as McCartney’s Wonderful Christmastime, Elton John’s Step into Christmas, John Lennon’s miserablist anthem Happy Xmas (War is Over), and (kill me now!) Cliff Richard’s wretched Mistletoe and Wine. It isn’t that there aren’t any great Christmas songs that can stand repeated listening*, just that hardly any are on NTWICC.
As much as Cliff Richard may deserve it, let me not lack generosity – especially at this time of year. Whether you celebrate Christmas for the birth of Christ or an excuse to get loads of gifts, or whether you follow a pagan path and see the winter solstice as the beginning of Spring’s cycle of rebirth, or you’re celebrating Hanukkah which confirms the ideals of Judaism – all these are joyous events. There are Muslim and Buddhist feast days in December too, so most of us have something to celebrate this month. In the Northern hemisphere, where it’s cold and night starts to descend at about 4.30 in the afternoon, and especially in the UK where energy prices are so high we can barely afford to heat our homes, anything to do with counting our blessings and lighting a candle is welcome.
So, have yourself a merry little whatever-you-celebrate. I’ll see you again in the New Year.
*For example, there’s O Come Emmanuel in versions by both Rosie Thomas and Sufjan Stevens, On this Winter’s Night by Lady A; What’s That Sound by J D McPherson; O Tannenbaum by the Vince Guaraldi Trio; and of course, Bob Dylan’s Must Be Santa.
Diary of a Narcissus (2022 pastel and charcoal A3)
Bees, moving from flower to flower collecting pollen to make into honey, helping the flowers to reproduce. Without bees pollinating the blooms they visit, many plants would die out, numerous crops would fail, and the animals, birds and humans that depend upon them would starve and die. The bee is probably unaware of its essential role in the grand scheme of things: it’s just doing a job in its own corner of the universe. Similarly, the picture you paint, the words you write, the music you compose or play is part of the fabric of the culture. If we surrender to the creative impulse, our singular piece of the puzzle takes its proper shape and adds to the whole.
This is adapted from a chapter called Intention in Rick Rubin’s acclaimed book on creativity, The Creative Act: A Way of Being. Rubin is that big beardy guy who popularised hip hop through co-founding Def Jam Records many moons ago and rejuvenated the career of Johnny Cash, encouraging him to try new material in the autumn of his years. It’s fair to say that he probably knows more than many about the creative spark.
The truth of his observation was brought home to me one evening during my life drawing class. About eight of us meet to draw a nude model every week. One or two use the long pose to paint a portrait in oils; another collages pieces of paper to produce a varied ground on which to draw; one chap with a more limited attention span produces two or three drawings during that long pose – sometimes they verge on cartoons with widely distorted features. All of these add to the greater whole: to be without one – as sometimes happens when someone is sick or on holiday – lessens the impact of the evening. When the model tours the room, taking photographs on his/her phone of the finished pieces, he/she sees a range of interpretations of the human body. In Rick Rubin’s words, “each singular piece of the puzzle…adds to the whole”.
This seems like a useful place to stop. I first posted here in March 2015. A great deal has happened over those years – both personally and in the wider world – and the place of blogs seems to have diminished somewhat. I have looked at numerous topics to do with drawing and painting, reported on courses I’ve attended, shared some thoughts about life models, loosening up, and learning from other artists. In recent years, though, I find I have less to say, and the ever longer gaps between posts admonish me with their silence.
Two subjects continue to nag away though. The first is the role of social media in creativity: I stopped trying to post here on a weekly basis when I realised the images I was posting were suffering in terms of quality. The same feeling hit me recently about Instagram, where I’ve been a much more regular contributor. Social media for me was a place where I could post pictures and connect with sympathetic people whose work I admired. Eventually, though, it became a hamster wheel where the need for ‘likes’ overtakes the value of the work itself. Every now and then you have to step down and breathe, or play, or experiment, or create without worrying about whether it’ll get over 100 likes or not.
The second subject is inspiration. I remain intrigued by the whole question of inspiration, its fickle nature, and its source. I’m sometimes baffled by some of the artists I follow on Instagram who seem content to keep recycling a single idea: I know galleries like this – if they can sell one flower painting they feel they can sell another, and don’t want their artists to start submitting something else – but what’s in it for the artist beyond sales? Is it rewarding or satisfying? Are they inspired to produce only one kind of painting, or was that their original inspiration that they feel safe in endlessly reproducing?
Where does inspiration come from anyway? It’s a mysterious thing, isn’t it? A couple of years ago I was rather ill with anaemia and lacked both the energy and the inspiration to do much of any quality. Responding to online ‘challenges’ ( see previous post) or drawing cards for the birthdays of family and friends kept me going, but my inspiration was as low as my red blood cells for some months. If inspiration comes from God – as the late Madeleine L’Engle claims in her book, Walking on Water – why did He withdraw it when I needed it the most? If it comes from a common source of inspiration that feeds off the work of artists past and present, why does it dry up – sometimes for ever? Perhaps these are questions that can never be answered.
Thank you to all of you who have followed this blog, sometimes for years, even when posts were thin on the ground. I followed the ‘likes’ of a post I produced a few years ago and was sad to see how many have stopped posting. One or two worried me in their silence – the lady who suffered from depression and ADHD who suddenly stopped, the woman who started drawing when her beloved husband died suddenly whose site somehow disappeared from my Reader. I hope they’ve simply found other outlets for their creativity.
I’m not saying that I won’t post ever again, just that this feels like a good time and place to pause. Thank you again for your time, engagement, and encouragement. It meant – and means – a great deal to me.
The Fool on the Hill (30cm x 15cm ink and coloured pencil 2022)
In my previous post I mentioned that last year, I’d tried to overcome a creative block by taking part in online challenges, particularly one, created by a group of illustrators, on folklore and folk customs. For those of you not on Instagram, I thought I’d share a few of the prompts and my responses.
Folklore is not an area I know a great deal about, so the research alone would be distracting before I’d even put pencil to paper. The first prompt was Fool, which was nicely open-ended for a starting point. It’s also great fun to draw medieval fools with their caps and bells and exaggerated movements. I chose The Fool on the Hill (above) just for the chance to draw an impossible hill, not to illustrate the Beatles song (in which, you’ll remember, the Fool stands ‘perfectly still’ and doesn’t prance around like a hare on a griddle).
The Tale of the Disappointing Tree (A4 ink and coloured pencil 2022)
The next prompt was Tree, which is where the research – and the strangeness – began.
James Frazer’s The Golden Bough describes a folk tradition in Bulgaria. On Christmas Eve, a woodsman would threaten a low-yielding fruit tree with an axe while a second man intercedes on the tree’s behalf. Three times the tree is threatened with destruction, three times its advocate pleads for mercy. The threat of extinction is enough to frighten the tree into producing fruit abundantly the following year.
Stars (A4 ink and coloured pencil 2022)
Later in the week we were given the prompt, Stars.
There are numerous approaches to this: Orion being killed by a giant scorpion and the gods arranging their constellations so that they never appear together in the night sky; the belief that shooting stars were the souls of new-born babies being despatched to Earth; or the rule that you should never point at stars because they represent gods who don’t like mortals pointing at them.
In the end I went for this charming medieval folk belief. Trying to count stars is again considered bad luck, but if you’re looking for a life partner you may count up to seven of them for seven nights, then on the eighth day the first person with whom you shake hands will become your husband or wife. So here’s my pale poet, eagerly counting up to seven while his troubadour strums upon a lute. He looks eager enough, doesn’t he? I do hope he finds someone.
There were further prompts for Costume, Victory, Tricks and Potions, all of which sent me off to reference books and internet searches. It was an inspiring week of learning, drawing, posting and admiring the efforts of others involved in the challenge. It also demonstrated that as much as I enjoy painting still life arrangements or churches or flowers, I’m at ease with this sort of pen and ink illustration and can concentrate on the subject without too much worrying about technique. If I’d been compelled to use acrylics or pastels without the comfort of the inked line I’d probably still be working on them. In that sense the challenge helped me return to creativity without too many hurdles to jump which, at that time, was more than welcome.
Most of all, looking at different subjects for six days (I missed Potions) and having to produce a drawing each day was a useful exercise to restore drawing muscles I’d neglected over the previous months. As I mentioned in my previous post, regardless of your particular area of creativity, these challenges can be both useful and inspiring. At the very least, you’ll discover something about trees and stars.
Angels: Christmas Card Design (15 cms x 15 cms ink and collage 2022)
Time flies. I’ve written nothing on this blog since last March – nearly a year ago. If anyone is still listening, let me explain.
For most of 2022 I suffered from a chronic, non-life-threatening illness, one that has not only sapped my strength but also drained my creativity. I simply had no inspiration. My attempts at drawing and painting were scuppered by the tank being firmly on zero: something I’d never experienced before. I’ve been able to create even in the depths of grief, of loss, of stress – but not during this debilitating ill health.
I was going to post something a few weeks ago about if you want to get back into your creative stride, try an online challenge. Whether your thing is drawing, painting, music, or writing, there are projects on the internet to kick start your creativity. I did one – a delightful drawing challenge about folktales (my contributions are on Instagram) – which really kindled the flame: the research into folktales inspired by a simple key word, thinking through the scenario and the composition, doing the actual drawing – but once the challenge was over the inspiration seeped away once more.
The only thing that combats lack of inspiration caused by ill health is, in my experience, getting better.
However, returning to the art you love gives you a helpful nudge. I looked again at TheArtofRichardThomson – my hero on high, plucked from us so early – and luxuriated in his linework and his humour. I read books by the recently deceased German illustrator, Wolf Erlbruch, and marvelled at his invention in each new project. We visited the Tate Modern Cézanne exhibition with friends not seen since the start of Covid and once again I was thrilled at his way with the humble apple. “Even for Cézanne the apple would only matter if it called up a breast in the painter’s mind…art’s subject is always the human clay,” writes NewYorker writer Adam Gopnik in his wonderful book, AttheStrangers‘ Gate.
Slowly, the flame started to sputter into life again. I drew a card for a friend’s significant birthday. A building in a nearby town. Then the Christmas card design above and the angels’ heads below. Pulling in influences and transforming them, feeling creativity flow again as my health improved.
In retrospect, I wish I’d performed some sort of daily drawing exercise, even during the most challenging months of my illness. Taking one object and drawing it every day – no pressure, no expectations, no need for inspiration, just flexing those drawing muscles. It would have kept the spirit buoyant, like the scent of a familiar room, a cocktail on a warm summer’s evening, a conversation with an old friend.
So that’s the story of my non-blogging ten months. Hopefully now that I’m drawing again I can also think of something to say about them. Fingers crossed!
Orchid (detail) (2022 acrylic and graphite 30cms x 20cms)
A writer who, as a child, didn’t like vegetables much, remembered her mother saying, “Eat up your greens! Think of all the starving children in Africa.” “How does my eating sprouts help the children in Africa?” asked the young writer-to-be.
I was reminded of this as I read Jay Rayner’s restaurant review in the (London) Observer newspaper recently: “On the morning my train to Liverpool pulled out of London Euston, the media was full of images of other trains: crowded ones, filled with terrified people, fleeing for their lives, an invading Russian army at their backs. I, meanwhile, was going to lunch.” Rayner followed this with four paragraphs of justification for writing about brown crab rarebit while the suffering continued in Ukraine. He quoted counsellor and agony aunt Philippa Perry’s advice, tweeted in response to a question on this theme, “Stay in the present and not the hypothetical mythical future. Deal with what is, not what might be. Remember to enjoy yourself as much as possible. It doesn’t help anyone if you don’t enjoy yourself.”
Recently, artists on Instagram have also been questioning the point of making art during wartime. Why draw these apples on an antique plate while the bombs fall on Kyiv? Is painting frivolous, irrelevant, even disrespectful when families are huddled in basements, fearful of their lives?
The artist and teacher Nicholas Wilton explained his reasons for continuing to create during these troubled times in a recent blog post: “Making our art is all about making connections — it moves us towards a connection to ourselves and others. Non-artists are also connected to our cherished vision when they experience…our art. This shared experience of what we make helps create a more connected and, as a result, a safer, kinder world. Making art is a practice of showing the world what truly matters. And it makes a difference.”
One of the many supportive comments on Wilton’s blog post, from a woman who had trained as a physician before switching to painting, underlined this point: “embodying what we are for is more powerful than opposing what we are against….Art heals. Living from that place, there is no inclination towards violence, harm, neglect, disrespect. Only love and celebration…generosity and gratitude, and so much more.” A recent clip on Twitter showed a young woman in her Ukranian apartment, the windows blown out, playing Bach on her piano before she left the room for ever, becoming a refugee from the place she called home. It was important for her to play that final piece amongst the devastation, on the brink of her unknown future, dressed in a warm coat in the ruins of her former life.
Painting a picture, writing a poem, playing the piano – all help us make sense of the world we live in and perhaps go some way towards helping to create a better world, one where “love and celebration, generosity and gratitude” are more in evidence. If we don’t do these things, it won’t help the people under fire in Ukraine; doing them, however, might just be a small step forward into the light.
A couple of years ago, a friend of mine called Tom Dykstra sent me a story he’d written for the children’s sermon at his Dutch Reformed Church in Holland, Michigan. It was a re-telling of the Grimm brothers’ story, The Fisherman’s Wife, although in Tom’s version the fisherman is the architect of his own downfall rather than being able to blame a greedy spouse. Sending me the piece, Tom wrote “I have no intentions to publish and am not asking you to illustrate the story. I just thought you might be interested in reading it and…visualizing wizened old Simeon scurrying over the dune. If you are moved to a sketch or two, I would love to see them!”
From time to time I put together an idea and sent it to Tom and his wife, Lois. They seemed to enjoy seeing them which encouraged me to continue. It became a fun thing to do, and I sent Lois a birthday card with Simeon holding a chubby fish which I hoped would cheer her up a little during a long and difficult series of medical interventions which, tragically, she didn’t survive. In February of this year I was halfway through another drawing for the story when Tom, too, passed away unexpectedly.
Tom and Lois’s daughter agreed to let me publish the story here with the handful of drawings I completed as a tribute to them both. I should say at the outset that I’m not a skilled illustrator of children’s stories but it was a great pleasure to do them, even with my limited expertise. I should also mention that Tom had thought of changing the ending – removing some of the religious references in the final paragraph – so that it could be read by those whose faith was not as central to their lives as his own. However, whether you share Tom’s faith or not, the story is a delightful one with a simple, honest and compassionate message. I’m thrilled and honoured that Tom shared it with me.
So, here it is, the story of Simeon and the magic fish that he found in his net one day:
In a time long ago and a place far away there lived a poor fisherman named Simeon. Simeon was so poor that he did not have enough money to live in a house like the other villagers. So, behind a dune, away from the wind and the sea, he put together a small shack made from the wooden timbers of wrecked ships that had washed up on the beach. Simeon’s little house had no door and no window, but only a small space where he could crawl in out of the weather. And, because it was made from the timbers of ships, it looked like a boat turned upside down.
Simeon earned a few pennies each day by taking his net over the dune and down to the seashore. All day he would throw his net into the sea. The few fish he caught he would take to the village to sell. Though Simeon had very little money, he was rich in other important ways. He was kind to other people and always willing to help them and had many friends among the local people. And the children, they loved him. When he came to town he would play games with them, and they would always crowd around him as he told them stories about when he was a child.
Simeon was not happy being poor, but he had long ago given up hope that things for him would ever be any different. Then one day something happened that completely changed his life. He was fishing as usual when his net happened to snare a large, strange looking fish. Simeon had never in his life seen that kind of fish before. And imagine his surprise when the fish began to talk! And as if that was not enough, Simeon was even more surprised by what the fish said. The large, strange fish begged in a loud voice, “If you will let me go instead of selling me in the village, I will give you whatever you wish.”
After Simeon got over the shock of hearing the fish talk, he said to himself: “I have to make a decision. This fish will certainly earn me more than a few pennies in the village. And what if the fish is not telling the truth and does not grant me my wish? I will lose the extra money I could have earned by selling it!” Then he had an idea: “I will make a wish and let the fish go. If my wish doesn’t come true, then the next time he comes I will catch him and then sell him in the village!” So Simeon said to the fish, “My boat shack is open to the outside weather. If you can, I would very much like to have a door and a window in my little house to keep out the wind and the rain.” “It will be done,” said the fish and he swam away. Simeon pulled in his net and sailed to the shore, running as fast his short skinny legs would take him to the top of the dune. And guess what? He looked down, and there was his shack fitted with a nice little door and a large glass window! He was so happy and thankful that he ran down the dune and opened and shut the door and window several times just to make sure they were real. It was an amazing thing: he had been blessed with a fish who could grant his wishes.
The next time the fish landed in his net, Simeon asked if he might please, please have a well for water and a small tree for shade near his house. It would be oh so nice not to have to walk all the way to the spring, and to have a cool place to sit when the sun was hot. And, of course, as you can guess, these wishes were granted. Simeon decided then and there that he would never, ever sell the fish; he knew a good thing when he saw it.
Weeks and months and years passed. Whatever Simeon wished for came to be, and he began to wish for more and more. Slowly his little upside down boat shack grew into a magnificent estate. There was a large, fancy mansion filled with fine furniture and large closets to hold his fancy clothes, a carriage house with several carriages, fields of corn and wheat, herds of cattle, horses, and pigs; and large barns to hold all of his crops and animals. Simeon became very rich. Soon he needed help to do all the work on his estate, so he went to the village to hire those people who used to pay him pennies for his fish.
Through all this time, it was not only Simeon’s house that changed, but Simeon himself became a changed man. Instead of humbly asking the fish for things, he started to demand them; he began to think he deserved them and had earned them. And Simeon became very proud and very vain. He bought fancy clothes; he got a fancy haircut which showed his large ears; he grew a mustache and had it curled into fancy swirls. Simeon’s eyes were no longer soft and gentle as they used to be but became hard and narrowed. His face became anxious and red. (The children thought it was because his new designer clothes were too tight!)
Although he was rich, he became poor in other important ways. He lost his friends in the village because he was no longer generous and helpful, but selfish and always greedy to get more things for himself. He became grouchy toward other people because he thought they were after his money. He began to yell at the children not to bother him. And so, when the children saw him coming, they didn’t flock to him as before but crossed over to the other side of the lane. Simeon thought that because he was rich he was important. And because he thought he was important, he thought he could boss other people around. The villagers began to dislike him and began to think he was just a boring old man who only thought about, and always talked about the things he owned. A few of the villagers felt sorry for him because he had lost the very things that had made him truly rich.
One day this rich, unhappy man, bored with all his stuff, had a crazy idea. He thought, “Because I am the most wealthy and important man around, I deserve to have a house like God has! I will go to see the fish.” Simeon hitched up his best horses to his chariot (he never walked anywhere anymore.) and drove to the seashore. He was surprised to see the fish already there, waiting for him. The fish said to Simeon, “I can indeed give you a house like God had. But this will be the last wish I can grant you; because in God’s house there is everything anyone could ever want.” Simeon let out with a nasty laugh, “That’s just fine with me. Be gone and don’t come back. Who needs a stupid old fish anyway, when he has a house like God’s?” And with that he drove his chariot as fast as he could to the top of the dune to look down on his wonderful prize.
But when he got to the top of the dune, he could not believe what he saw. It sent him into a panic which stopped his breath and seized his heart. Everything he owned was gone! His magnificent house with all his precious possessions, his barns, his fields, his orchards, his crops and herds of animals, all gone! The only building was a ramshackle shed that looked like a place where animals lived. Instead of the fruit orchards there was a single dead tree with two branches that stuck out sideways, sort of like the arms of a cross. There were no fancy clothes; just a single large piece of cloth caught in the tree and fluttering in the wind. In place of his animal herds there was just one small, skinny donkey standing patiently by. Well, Simeon was so angry that his red face turned purple. He leaped out of his chariot, jumped up and down, screamed, and shook his hands at the heavens.
Then a very loud voice said, “SIMEON! WHAT IS YOUR PROBLEM?” It was so loud that Simeon was stunned into silence and the six white horses ran away with the chariot. When Simeon finally got his voice and his courage back, he shouted, “I asked for a house like God’s house and the fish said I could have it! All there is here is this stupid old shack, a dead tree, and half-dead donkey!” There was a long silence. Then the voice said, “Simeon, Simeon, you did not know what you were asking for. When I came to live on earth I was born in a stable like that. My clothing was a simple cape. I never rode in a chariot, but on a donkey. And in the last hours of my life I hung on a tree like the one you see. And Simeon, … I did it all for YOU.”
Simeon realized that the voice was the voice of Jesus. The poor man did not know what to do! He wanted to escape the voice but he knew he never could. He wanted to make excuses for himself but could not think of any good ones. He wanted to blame others for what he now realized was his own very bad behavior, but there was no-one else to blame. At last, he was overcome by a feeling of deep, deep shame, and guilt, and sorrow. He realized he had become a terrible person: greedy and jealous and grouchy and unkind and proud and self-centered, and on and on. In the end, all that this miserable, lonely man could do was to lie face down in the sand and cry. He cried so hard that his tears formed little mud puddles in the dune. And then the voice returned, more gently now: ”Do not cry Simeon. I came to forgive and to heal all those who have a sin-sick soul. And by my Spirit I have come to live with such people in shacks even worse than the one you see. I have come to live with them in caves and trenches and foxholes, in hospital rooms and jail cells, under bridges and in sewer pipes. And if you will have me, I will come to live with you in that little shack below the dune.” Slowly, very slowly, Simeon raised his head from the sand. His voice was weak and wavering: “Oh please, please, if you would, I would like very much to have you come into my house and live with me.”
And thus began the happiest days of Simeon’s life. He was a new man. The villagers welcomed him back as a long-lost friend, and the children once again ran to him for games and stories. He whistled his way through his days of fishing and was happy never to see the magic fish again. One evening as he lay on his cot, there came to his mind the tune of a song he had learned long ago as a child. As he hummed the tune the words of the song slowly came back to him; and he sang: “Into my heart, into my heart; come into my heart, Lord Jesus. Come in today, come in to stay; Come into my heart Lord Jesus.” It was a song that would become Simeon’s theme song all the rest of his life. The very next morning he hurried into the village and instead of telling the children a story, he taught them his song.
Text (c) Estate of Thomas Dykstra; illustrations (c) Michael Richards
How easy, do you think, would it be for me to loosen up my art practice when I’m the sort of person who arrives at airports two hours ahead of my flight, cooks sausages in a neat row, and arranges his CDs by genre, artist/composer, and then date of release (with compilations, of course, at the end)?
If the sight of a wayward sausage in a frying pan is going to cause me mild anxiety, how am I going to be at ease with wobbly lines and the threat of the non-figurative? Yet the little drawing above, drawn in a matter of minutes with a stick dipped in ink, is one of my most popular images on Instagram.
Well, one way is to allow someone to take you by the hand and lead you into the wild woods. For me, that person was abstract painter Jenny Nelson, and specifically a wonderful free tutorial she has compiled on greyscale collage. Nelson is a superb artist and has the skills to teach some of the tricks of her trade. Her own work is bold and expressive as you can see if you spend a few minutes wandering around her website.
In the tutorial she demonstrates a simple exercise that enables the most uptight person to loosen up. I won’t describe it in any detail because you should really take a look at it yourself. I’d even go so far as to say that even if you’re not a visual artist, but a musician or a writer, the cleansing nature of this 50 minute exercise would help you too.
I produced about four collages after the tutorial, which again received a warm reception on Instagram. One of the four, I think, works well as a composition in its own right, not just an exercise in loosening up:
Composition (collaged painted papers 135mm x 220mm 2021)
I’ve gone back to producing drawings using sticks and discarded feathers as drawing tools, but have also continued to work with collage using painted paper as my basic materials. It’s a practice which I’ll probably continue to develop alongside my other work, simply because it shakes around one’s preconceptions in a rather satisfying way, like lottery tickets in a hat.
That doesn’t mean I’ll stop lining up sausages in a frying pan any time soon. One of my closest and most enduring friendships is with someone who does exactly the same thing, so both of us cannot be wrong.
The Carnival is Over (A4 ink and coloured pencils 2021)
We’re told that we have ten years to slash the emissions that lead to climate change before it will become impossible to reverse the process. The pollution of the world’s oceans disturbs me more than any other environmental crisis, possibly because it’s easier to observe its effect than rising temperatures or melting polar icecaps.
This drawing was inspired by two events. Recently I walked along a holiday resort beach at the end of a sunny day, when families were packing up to go home. The amount of rubbish they left behind was unbelievable: polystyrene food containers, plastic wrappers and carrier bags, all sorts of junk they could have taken home. Some helpfully put all their garbage in a plastic bag and left it on the beach for seagulls to tear apart and the tide to wash away.
The other event happened 25 years ago off the coast of Mumbai. I was on a boat with about 30 others when the engine stalled. As the crew tried to fix it and the boat drifted aimlessly, I wondered if we might have to swim to the shore. The water was brown and uninviting, dotted with the untreated detritus of a large, densely populated city.
A Certain Line 