stones

Parenting finds me with a 90 minute slot without distractions in the Jewellery Quarter in Birmingham each week through the autumn.  Here are two sketches drawn sitting outside St Paul’s church.  The first was drawn mostly blind (looking at the scene and drawing by feel) in pen and then touched up with water and a limited palette of six watercolour pencils.

The second was supposed to deconstruct the scene into a few sweeps of the crayon but then I drew over it with a 6B graphite stick, adjusted with an eraser.

The stones are having fun in the first version, but have been caught and are stiff to attention in the second, though one has sloped off somewhere.

Vast works of other ages encumber

Stse is an almost-island, separated from the mainland of the great south continent by marshes and tidal bogs, where millions of wading birds gather to mate and nest.  Ruins of an enormous bridge are visible on the landward side, and another half-sunk fragment of ruin is the basis of the town’s pier and breakwater. Vast works of other ages encumber all Hain, and are no more and no less venerable or interesting to the Hainish than the rest of the landscape.

Ursula K le Guin, Four Ways to Forgiveness, Gollancz 1995.

Le Guin’s galaxy was long ago colonised by humans from Hain.  Indeed this is so buried in history’s layers that humanity’s first origins are forgotten, and people on Earth believe themselves aliens.  After that great expansion and genetic manipulations by the ancestral Hainish, peoples in each system developed in isolation for a thousand millenia.  Time dilation during near-light-speed travel and cold-sleep means that your left-behind children and grandchildren grow old and die before you make your new start on another planet.  In the last few thousand years, which might be only a few lifetimes for space-farers, the Hains have sought to bring all humanity back into a loose community called the Ekumen.

This positioned le Guin as a galactic social anthropologist.  The underlying framework for each story is that of Ekumen observers exploring and falling foul of variations of kinship, politics, religion and economics.  Her most recurring themes are variations on gender and sex, and the power relationships which spring from these.  The Left Hand of Darkness, her novel written nearly fifty years ago, to me seems fresh and challenging in its deconstruction of our assumptions about humanity, encapsulated in the sentence “The king was pregnant”.  The four novellas which comprise Four Ways to Forgiveness offer perhaps a more conventional take on sexuality, shockingly so, for it is tied into power dynamics, slavery, rape and oppression.  It took me a second reading to confirm that her gentle writing style was, in each narrative, capturing a love-story.

The throw-away description of the enormous bridge, the ancient vast ruin present but ignored, gives to me the feel of le Guin’s universe.

I drew this listening to the hypnotic rhythms of Canto Ostinato (Simeon ten Holt) weaving a tapestry of sound from four pianos.

I am not-drawing

I am not-drawing these last few months.

These are the few sketches that have slipped through.  On holiday, I had some hours walking the Devon clifftops on my own, not-drawing, looking at the size and shapes of eroded rocks, their highlights and shadows, and the kestrel plummeting down the cliff face and skimming the beach.  Eventually I stopped not-drawing in pen and conte crayon.

Some days earlier at Tintagel castle, I stopped not-drawing for a while looking down into the rocky bay.

A girl, about 7, called Charlotte, came to watch (with parents).  I suggested to her that the way to draw was just to believe you can, look and feel, and put the marks on the paper that seem right.  I gave her my pad, graphite stick and crayons and she drew.

Today my son went to a youth drama group in the Jewellery Quarter in Birmingham, giving me 90 minutes to wander the empty streets not-drawing the varied buildings in the drizzle.  I drifted to St Paul’s Church and not-drew the gnarled trees in the graveyard.  I called in at the Royal Birmingham Society of Artists and viewed their Next Wave final exhibition.  I was taken by Clare Pentlow‘s paper cut sculpture, made of waves of small projections which could carry data like an old printout from a Sangar sequence.  Yasmin Bowle‘s etched metal plates showing a formative images of gender stereotyped roles from the 1960s with pattern instructions for restrictive corsetry.  The intimacy of Emily Sparkes‘ painting I Sleep contrasted with her frankly disturbing pastiche of EH Shepard’s drawings, HUIINY.  I think she also painted my favourite piece Froot, which is nowhere referenced on the internet, in which pieces of fruit are painted in a picture encyclopedia format, described in corrupted text speech in terms showing increasingly bizarre anthropomorphism.

In the last fifteen minutes before returning to the theatre, I found myself not not-drawing in a small pad in ink and raindrops.

Why had people bothered to build a bridge when there were boats and flyers to ride?

The quote is from Ursula K Le Guin, ” A Man of the People”, the third of four novellas that comprise Four Ways to Forgiveness.

Having sketched this quickly, I now see her iconic bridge is different in scale, described as enormous, reaching far above a landscape of tidal pools inhabited by myriad wading birds, descended originally from those brought from Earth.

It is old, maybe a million years.   So, I guess, it was built across a long-changed landscape, and likely by machines and labour controlled by strident imperialists, alien to the contemporary pueblo-dwellers with production divided by gender, lineage and tradition.