Rolling the ball...

Kate Bush sang about rolling the ball, and now I'm thinking that creativity is a lot like this, keeping a ball rolling. The longer you stand around pondering the ball the less likely you are to get anywhere because a ball that isn't rolling isn't fullfilling its purpose. It may as well be a cube.

I've found another old(ish) piece out tonight and between trying to calm myself down after a nasty Tax revelation (hopefully putting that right tommorow) and watching the new detective drama on BBC1 Death in Paradise (a bit like Jonathan Creek set in the Carribean) I've worked on it adding new splashes and layers of colour in watercolour, coloured pencil, gold acrylic ink and oil pastel.


I just hope all that lot stays on the Ingres paper and doesn't fall off!

Go under the ivy...

More progress on my new drawing, and more mistakes! Only, for some reason, I'm not that bothered about them. No one frets, dwells upon and broils over their errors like I do. Naturally anxious, I regularly take a pimple and rub and scratch at it, worrying away at the thing until I have a huge suppurating sore.


Just like I worried away at that not very good simile.


Lets just say at the moment, my artwork is causing me a whole lot less anxiety than my animate existence. I escape into mark making, scrutinising my blurry photographs, interpreting a few splats of ink, scrounging around in my memory (beyond what I would recall easily, literally going 'under the Ivy' of what I recall consciously without visual prompt) to make lines that resemble nature. And I'm loving it, at the moment. Despite the stiff back, watery eyes and achy ears (my headphones are as indispensable as my dip pen and ink).

I'm wondering if I dare, seeing as this drawing (like any other) is a journey on so many levels, and seeing as this drawing has taken me down more bogus alleys than a dodgy satnav, I dare give it this title:-


Do you know I think I might.


...a note on a trailer for a programme on R4 in which the author talks about his multi-faceted creativity. What he says about practicing two disciplines is extremely interesting. Sounds like it's going to be a fascinating interview.

And this sounds like fun too…I love Paul Nash, his brooding seascape of the Winter Sea (Dymchurch) is as much to be a portrait of a state of mind as it is of ice on water.