The Folktale Challenge

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).

Have yourself a merry little…

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.

The Bee

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, the tree, and the stars

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.

Just like starting over

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 The Art of Richard Thomson – 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 New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik in his wonderful book, At the Strangers‘ 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!

Angel Heads (20 cms x 20 cms ink 2022)

Art in wartime

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.

The Carnival is Over

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.

The micro and the macro.

I can draw a cat

Mickey (A5 Prismacolor indigo blue pencil 2020)

Axel Scheffler, perhaps best known as the illustrator of the Gruffalo, once said in a radio interview that if you can draw, people think you can draw anything. There are, he continued, so many things he wouldn’t even attempt.

As a young man this used to bother me enormously. Why can’t I draw a passable bicycle? If I can draw a dog why do I struggle to draw a horse? These days I simply avoid drawing bicycles or horses, but if my life depended on drawing a bicycle for some odd reason then I’d draw it like Quentin Blake.

I’ve also regretted never learning to play the guitar – or the acoustic bass. Why didn’t you then? you might ask. The answer, I’m afraid, is that I never wanted to be a mediocre musician and I was daunted by the amount of practice required to become proficient.

This is all rather sad, isn’t it? Worrying about what one can’t do instead of celebrating what one can. Not doing something that would have probably given me enormous pleasure and provided great comfort down the years simply because I would never be John Renbourn or Stefan Grossman.

Bonny Mayer: Glasses

My good friend, Bonny Mayer, recently decided that she’d like to draw and enrolled in a class during an extended stay in Thailand. After a couple of hours the teacher returned her money and advised her to try something else. Most of us, hearing that evaluation of our skills, might never pick up a pencil again. Not Bonny. On her return to the US she enrolled in another course and frequently posts her wonderfully vivid, lively drawings on Facebook (see above).

Let’s celebrate our own potential then, draw wonky horses and raise one of Bonny’s characterful glasses to the art of not giving up. We have one life and it’s frustratingly short, so not filling it with as much as we can would seem to be something of a shame. Wouldn’t you agree?

Entre chien et loup

Summer Rain (A5 sketchbook page, ink and watercolour, 2020)

Entre chien et loup – between dog and wolf – is simply a term for twilight or the golden hour in photography, but what an evocative phrase.

I feel it could apply to any transitional stage when things are lacking in clarity, don’t you agree? That point on the path from agnosticism to faith, perhaps, when you want to believe but still entertain doubts. Or playing a musical instrument when you can’t quite get through a piece from beginning to end without pausing to re-arrange your fingers on the keys. Or, as this is an art blog, a point between one stage of your development and another when you can’t quite throw off the old or fully embrace the new.

For some years now I’ve tried to loosen up my drawing and painting style. I’ve enrolled on courses at places like Seawhite Studios, where I’ve been taken firmly by the hand and pulled outside my comfort zone; attended life drawing classes, where the teacher would tell me – 20 minutes before the end of class – to rub out my dreary charcoal drawing and start again, producing something rushed, yes, but also free-spirited and dynamic.

In the end though, the decision to take the next step has to be one’s own. Like a baby bird on the edge of its nest, you have to make that leap and expect to fly. With me it works intermittently: a year ago I sat in the autumn sunshine in the gardens of Versailles and drew crows pecking around for crumbs. As crows don’t stay in one place for long I had to draw quickly and the resulting sketch was lively and bold by my standards. A few hours later I did a drawing of a rotting pear (which moves less often than a feeding crow) and fell back into my old ways.

Versailles crows (A5 sketchbook page, pencil, 2019)

But once you’ve made that leap the results are wonderful to behold. A few weeks ago I watched painter and printmaker, Rosemary Vanns, drawing artichokes. Barely looking at the paper, her hand moved with confidence producing firm lines that suggested rather than reproduced the vegetable in front of her. Of course this is practice, but it’s also confidence, knowing you can do it before you start. It’s recognising – intuitively perhaps – the path you want to take and boldly moving one foot in front of the other.

Rosemary Vanns’ charcoal drawings of artichokes on her studio wall,
September 2020

That is the secret you need to know to take that important next step on whatever journey you’re engaged upon. That belief that you can do it, that you can keep your gaze fixed on the artichoke and allow your fingers to move and they’ll produce something that suggests what you see before you. Believe, just believe.

So from where you’re standing, is it a dog or a wolf?

Hold Still

Sunflower – front and back (A5 Stillman and Birn Gamma sketchbook 2019)

Sally Mann is probably best known – to those without an interest in contemporary photography – as that woman who took pictures of her kids naked or, perhaps, the one who photographed decomposing bodies at a federal forensic anthropology facility.

She is that Sally Mann, as well as the one who documented her husband’s muscular dystrophy in a series of deeply moving images; who published pictures of the Deep South, “haunted landscapes, battlefields, decaying mansions…and the site where Emmett Till was murdered” (according to Newsweek); who wrote a remarkable, award-winning memoir, listed as one of the twenty best in the New York Times, called Hold Still.

It’s worth reading for its beautiful prose and often candid photographs, including ones that Mann thought hadn’t actually worked. One of the book’s many charms is this Gagosian-represented artist’s admission that some of her work, y’know, wasn’t up to scratch. That happens to me. It happens to you as well, I imagine? Well, it also happens to those whose work is on sale in one of the world’s leading galleries.

This shouldn’t come as a surprise. It’s unlikely that even the most accomplished photographer will produce spun gold every time she points her camera. Yet how satisfying to read that:

Writing came first. I was frequently the poet on duty when the Muse of Verse, likely distracted by other errands, released some of her weaker lines, but that didn’t stop my passion for it.

Maybe you’ve made something mediocre – there’s plenty of that in any artist’s cabinets – but something mediocre is better than nothing, and often the near-misses, as I call them, are the beckoning hands that bring you to perfection just around the blind corner.

It’s that passion, those beckoning hands, that keep us moving on. We probably shouldn’t seek perfection as such (and Ms Mann points out elsewhere that this is something with which she struggles on a daily basis) but it’s the moving forward that matters. It’s not just a case of the grass being greener over there, but the passion in creating something is requited more completely when you achieve something like the image – or the piece of writing – you had in your head.

I’m not sure I really needed Sally Mann to tell me that, but I’m somehow pleased that she confirmed it in this very special memoir.