It’s six in the morning and I write this after taking down the election poster, but not yet knowing the outcomes. Reflecting my mood, I am listening to Leonard Cohen’s Famous Blue Raincoat.
The last polls suggested the leading parties were neck and neck, leadership of the next government balanced on a knife edge. For as long as I don’t look, this is still true: we have at one and the same time both Labour and Conservative-led coalitions. In a few minutes, I will collapse the probabilities by looking. And I fear that what I will find is a Conservative near majority. Their interests converge with those of the Scots Nationalists in breaking up the country so a narrow cadre of financial interests can rule without check the broken remnants.
Election day was also my son’s tenth birthday. The day turned out themed around sloths, his totemic animal. Here he is last weekend, sitting on the train reading Philip Pullman on his way to watch his mother run her first 10K race: 58 minutes by the way.
Here are my remaining sketches from the last week, an attempt to visualise the bird beneath the feathers.
kestrelart 
Love your son so engrossed! And well done to your wife! Not the election results that many wanted but I think the fear of the ‘rule of the Scots’ changed the outcome…
I wondered how you felt about the recent election, kestralart. When I heard the news, our radio lead me to believe that it was a close race and that the labor party may have won. Very good portraits of your children. I chuckled a bit at one of your bird pictures. I really like it. That one above the first colored picture of the birds on the nest or in grasses? That sketch with the two heads? They look so much like a couple at odds with one another. 🙂
Hi Leslie
The party I support has its origins in the Labour movement in the industrialised heart of the country in the early to mid twentieth century. It was collectivist and socialist and had done great things, though I found it misogynistic, racist and homophobic when I first joined. The world is very different and it has transformed. But there is no simple vision that binds us all together. It needs to embrace an alternative economics that recognises value in activity that is not captured in financial transaction, and that captures metrics of the harm we do to each other and the environment rather than counting all activity as positive. It also needs to rebuild the legitimacy of politics as our main defence against the powerful. But this is abstruse and academic. It’s so much easier to be nationalist and stick to conventional economic language. And it’s those themes that won the election. I don’t know how we overcome these challenges.
That pair of common terms did look like a married couple, but not so much as the turbulent gull pairs, on their adjacent nests like a street of rowdy neighbours.
But I think I’m struggling with my drawing at the moment, neither accurate nor free.
Cheers for your thoughts and sorry for the lecture in response!
Ne il
Thank you for your reply. This is how I learn. We are, all over the world, facing the need to change.
I’m learning too.
So sorry about the election. Your drawings are beautiful, though. I especially like the one of your son reading (a beautiful thing! Thank you Philip Pullman) and the second bird one, that very architectonic one of the bird head looking nearly at us. Thank you for the inspiration.
Great drawings, lousy election result. The Labour Party has lost its direction. The Blairites are back with a vengeance, but what’s the point of becoming Tory Light? Whatever happened to socialism? I despair 😡
Dear Rosie
Thanks for your comment on the drawings. I feel I am losing my way with my drawing a bit (it’s not just Labour) so comments are helpful.
I have to say that my heart sinks when I read the pitches of the leadership contenders and new MPs. In some ways the Tory message is simple with no embarrassment over unearned wealth or concerns over impoverishment or fears for the environment, it’s divisive but simple. Labour’s vision should be so much more nuanced, an attempt at balance multiple interests including those with no voice and sometimes no vote. But I read neither intellectual power nor empathy in what they say, so there is no vision, just blather.
I keep writing about politics in my art blog because I find it hard not to talk about what is on my mind. As a professional artist, you, I think, live your beliefs through your drawings whether on residence in Pakistan, of the Holocaust memorial or, recently, through your serial sketches of ordinary people. Would you agree? The one thing I cannot draw is the intensity of my own working life as a cancer doctor, for obvious reasons. I feel reluctant to draw from what I read in the paper, using photographs taken by others of events I have not myself seen. I am finding it hard to prioritise time for planned studio pieces. So my sketches are increasingly just hobbyist drawings of landscapes and birds and do not express my feelings without words to accompany them.
Cheers
Neil
Your sketches express your love for nature and careful observation and understanding of it and these are the things that the world needs a bit more of.
Nowadays I see the birds better, because your sketches made me pause and look more carefully at their shapes, postures, gestures and I know that my understanding of what each particular bird is very superficial, because you show how deep the study of something can go.