Of Nomadism and Pencil Lead
I cannot recall if my parents resorted to that all-too-familiar subterfuge to keep me occupied during trips: a pencil and a cheap block of paper. I know we certainly did with our son – the result: at least dozen weighty cardboard boxes full of his drawings in the basement. Judging from him, it is a ploy that loses effectiveness around the age of 11 (sooner if you’ve imprudently allowed Game Boys and sundry into your lives).
As for me, it’s a practice I abandoned in art school, only to take it up seriously again in New Zealand when Alan Lee, another impenitent sketcher-in-any-circumstance, made me the gift of a blank sketchbook. (Actually, I think he and I must practically keep the manufacturer in business just by ourselves. There is definitely a sponsorship opportunity here: “The Lord of the Rings, from Imagination to the Screen in Daler Rowney sketchbooks”. While I’m at it, I’m open to talks with Staedler for the pencils…)
Naturally, doodling is best done when actually travelling. Drawing is MUCH more productive than reading the airline security card or refolding the air sickness bag for the 15th time… isn’t it strange, though, how travelling nowadays involves so much sitting still? Nonetheless, all that waiting can fill a sketchbook in no time. Some of my most satisfying doodles are done miles from home.
In fact, I would almost travel just for the disembodiment it offers. I’ve been told that if I was to focus a little more assiduously on things, I wouldn’t be so prone to motion sickness of the soul, but I think it’s something else. I truly think that humanity, in renouncing nomadism, has retained a certain restlessness nonetheless. As it’s unlikely I will one day shift to Oulan Bator or Hamedan, (wooed as I am by those seductive sirens of the sedentary: central heating, running water, electricity and the like) my would-be transhumance is confined to pencil migrating across a landscape of paper.
(I admit that when the captain blithely announced, en route for Tokyo last month, that we were flying over Oulan Bator, I was so assailed by vivid images and stories of Ghenghiz Khan and the Mongol hordes that I would happily have hopped off right then and there – the sound of morin khuur and throat singing was still in my head when we touched down in Narita.)
We can no longer embrace removal and renewal. If we could, we would stop the earth from turning, still the tides, suppress all those reminders of the transience of our brief sojourn. Our addiction to permanence stultifies our abillity to make sense of anything. Since we no longer move with the rhythm of the earth, we resent its relentless motion. Seasons pass over our heads, we clearcut forests and we hug trees. We extoll the virtues of authenticity as avidly as we eliminate it. Our footprints on this earth are sheathed in concrete. We eulogize nature, we drain rivers to water the grass. Our spirits soar, we poison the air.
Would that we could be lighter somehow. We are rooted to the spot.
All this makes me despair that I can ever truly understand anything that by nature must slip through my fingers. (And here I had set out to write something rather lighter. I always feel like a tightrope walker with no platform in sight, either before or behind. A tightrope walker in the middle of the sky, pole leaving arabesques in the air; so my pencil traces the curves and lines of my search for equilibrium.) Doubtlessly that explains the need to make images. They remain when the inspiration is forever gone. (Inspiration is shod lightly, and leaves no trace when it moves on. It follows a path of its own, twisting or overgrown. That is why it’s so hard to find – our minds longing as they do for signposts and highways rather than the serendipity of the byway.)
So, immobile in motion I remain, pencil firmly transcribing the passing of the seasons and the rotation of the earth. That’s why I keep a firm grip on it. I certainly wouldn’t want to be left behind…
APRIL SHOWERS
In early spring, Nature welshcombs her hair, shaking out dead leaves and twigs. “Enough winter.” she mutters, brushing sleepy toads and old nests from the folds of her tattered brown cloak. “Time for a shower.” Spring is the most beautiful of seasons, before summer’s make-up goes on.
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SKIN DEEP
Delight and dismay are my lot in equal measure every time someone gets a tattoo inspired by my work. Strangely enough, I always feel somehow responsible – and they don’t wash off if you grow tired of them one day.
This one was sent in by Tom Walsh of Ireland, and I have to say that to have a native of the land that invented Celtic knotwork choose one of my pictures is a real honour.
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The original is here.
