… I’m glad that you stood in my way

what can I possibly say …

I sat with OA by the side of a Manchester canal and we wondered how we speak through our drawings, in the way David Lynch captured whole narratives in one or two still images and a bunch of words.

My drawings in pen and conte crayon continue to represent what I see, however much I want to abstract from them.

OA’s latest series of drawings are of a male face and move away from simple representation, somehow capturing more sense of story.

blind sketches

I went to Abbey Road Resurfaced, a recreation of the Beatles iconic album live with Jack Goodall [Paul], Rob Peters [John], Emma Reading [George] and Jack Smith [Ringo].   It was brilliant and enjoyable gig.  It deserves to be promoted more widely and to larger audiences – the front man and organiser is Rob Peters (robpeters05@gmail.com).

Emma is my lovely guitar teacher who has taught me from scratch from my being unable to read music or keep a beat.  She was playing guitar and electric sitar.

These sketches were done in a pocket book in the dark at arms length and with Emma hidden behind a pillar.  I could not capture the elegance of her left wrist and hand as she played.

Lynchian narratives

The person who blogs as Still Outside Authority is known for giving gnomic titles to WordPress posts: the latest landscape line drawings are headed “Under the Gibbet“.   There is something of David Lynch in this linking portentous words to image.

Yesterday, OA and I walked the canals between Manchester Piccadilly Station and the artspace HOME.   Here was my last sketch, coloured this morning in conte crayon and watercolour, having first been re-inked to obliterate the heavy black lines in the original on-site drawing.  A cleverer artist would have left that expanse of water as white paper, with a minimum of lines to suggest ripples.

We had visited the exhibition My Head is Disconnected: visceral drawings and relief paintings by David Lynch (open just one more week).  In these images, we meet recurring characters and a house motif.  This is not a storyboard, rather each individual picture might stand for a whole film, the series connected by a single director.  Each work encapsulates the totality of narrative and dialogue, characterisation, build-up and climax and resolution, tone and mood in unmoving shapes and cryptic utterances.  We fill in the gaps (the missing 90 minutes of film) in our responding imaginations.  That recurrent house icon is clearly, very much, not safe as houses.  We see “light fire boy” and the caption beneath “meiah is a girl who he likes AA lot”; “Who is outside my house” which throws out a poignant thought about the dog; “Her shadow began to change“; “Bob’s antigravity factory” with the artists fingers clawing through the think earthbound paint; “A lonely figure talks to himself softly” standing in a storm, expressing the thought common to us all; and Bob’s meeting Mr Redman is not welcome at all.