Doodling

We had the first Splinter Group meeting of the year on Friday. We’ve been struggling to start our next wood engraving project, a calendar for this year’s Fortingall Art, so we did some drawing in search for inspiration. We took turns to describe a painting for the others to draw. We mostly chose pictures with strong narratives or with a dreamlike quality, I guess because they were easier to describe. There were some peculiar pictures like the four unicorns and a naked lady in Charles Bowen Davies’ otherworldly painting Unicorns and a medieval scene from the Devonshire Hunting Tapestries. To loosen up we drew with our non-dominant hand, with our eyes shut, without taking the pen off the paper and various combinations of all three. It felt like directed doodling, a strange combination of concentration and letting the hand go where it will and it helped take the mind far away from all the hang ups about drawing we all had to some extent. I never went to art school but I managed to keep drawing, occasionally and not as much as I should. Even those amongst us who were art-school trained didn’t do as much drawing as they felt they should. I don’t know where that sadly common belief comes from that you can either draw or not draw and most likely not so best not try. Wherever it comes from we needed to play tricks on ourselves to get drawing on Friday but they worked. I can’t say my drawings were useable for anything but they were fun to do. We finished by drawing images from a couple of poems, both by Susanne Knowles, Fox Dancing and Tails and Heads. To me that was the most visual exercise of all. She managed to create amazing images, and we didn’t have to think how to describe them, her poetry did it for us. A liberating day.