Stuck between charcoal and this line
My art journey
Beginning
Art was always who I was as a child. My uncle worked in factory which somehow meant he bought home huge wads of paper with perforated edges you had to tear away. The feeling of sitting on the floor of his house and tearing the paper is engrained in my memory.
I always drew characters and listed their personalities and attributes. Mostly I was inspired by Nick Sharratt because he illustrated the Jacqueline Wilson books I loved to read. And I thought ‘I could do that.’
So I wanted to be artist, and everyone frowned uneasily and said that art was a lovely hobby. Unfortunately, I was the kind of sensitive child who very much took things to heart.
It confused me how much everyone I knew loved to watch tv. At my new school we had to answer a quiz, including ‘favourite tv programme’ and I wrote Friends because it was one of the only ones I could think of - too humiliated to say I didn’t watch tv. People seemed to watch it effortlessly. I couldn’t understand why - reading was much easier. You could create the set in your mind. You could read as fast or slow as you wanted. You never missed chunks of conversation or key words. It took far less brain power, far less energy, far less effort. People find this relaxing? I was incredulous. (For context- read my newsletter on hearing loss here.)
I read, I painted, and I cooked a lot of soup.
Moving on
My friends were going to university and I wanted a reason to move out of my parents house and explore somewhere new. I had no concept of what university meant, what the purpose of A Levels was, thankfully I had kind friends to explain.
I drew a lot, I started painting too. I loved painting abstract landscapes, I loved using colour and I loved painting with my hands. I used inks and paints and string and huge canvases. My A Level art teacher told me I was producing too much art, and I should think about creating a bit less. But honestly, I wasn’t sure how else to fill my time at home.
First I did a Foundation Diploma in Art and Design. I longed to move away but in the UK you can’t get a loan for this course (and the £30 per week education maintenance allowance doesn’t cover much). I stayed home, going to my closest university, the Arts University in Bournemouth. It was wonderful. Everyone was creative and strange and the courtyard was always full of music projects and costume wearers and drama projects and installation art. It felt lively and free. But some people in my class were brilliant. Really, really brilliant- excelling in every single medium; photography, fine art, printing, illustration, sculpture. I was amazed and terrified. My head kept telling me, ‘you’re not good enough’, ‘this is a nice hobby’. So I did become the first person in my family to go to university. But I didn’t study art, I studied Art History. I moved away. I felt free, almost.
Life drawing
At university I missed drawing. Art history is entirely theory, and it was mostly fascinating, particularly modules covering my favourite topics such as abstract expressionism and activist art.
The only art related thing which felt accessible was the campus life drawing club, so I went. And I kept life drawing, after I left University, after I moved away, after I hopped from job to job and town to town.
Another life drawing session. A regular stands next to me observing my work (his work is fantastic, all in earthy soft pastels).
‘Yes, you’re stuck between charcoal and this line’.
He was right. I drew in two distinct styles - sticking to outlines or emitting lines entirely and using smudgy charcoal.
This kept on for years, a discord between the two. I was drawn to the messiness and smudginess of charcoal. I was drawn to the cleanliness and negative space of the line.
I also loved to do abstract paintings of the landscape, using paints like I did at school, but my IBS really left me unable to access the countryside. If you’ve experienced it, you’ll know how debilitating it can be. I took advantage of being a city (this is when I lived in Leeds). I took short courses in illustration and printmaking without progressing. I felt torn, and I had no idea how to stitch these styles together.
Beginning Again
2020, (that was four years ago. Yes, four) I felt a wave of passion for drawing again, after a frustrating period of mismatching styles and illness that kept me indoors. My IBS dwindled and I wanted to be outside - to draw and look.
I began to draw all the time; before work, after work, on my lunch break. I followed artists on Instagram, I took up an online course in illustration (Find your creative voice by Goodship Illustration). I lived near the sea in the country so my daily walks (this is lockdown times) were full of nature and I drew and drew and drew.
I discovered wax pastels and they felt great. I loved to draw mountains, despite having no real mountains in sight.
I started to gain followers on instagram and this felt like validation that maybe my work was ok. (Top tip- do not use instagram for validation.) Something felt missing - my work felt tight and unemotive. That other part of me, the messy smudgy abstract part- felt neglected.
I began to experiment with other materials - soft pastels, pens, paints. I stumbled upon inks- oh yes, that thing I loved to use when I was at school. I experimented with drawings that were messy and felt chaotic. I pushed it as far as I could. I used my hands to apply materials and smudge materials. I enjoyed the process, I felt an emotional connection to how I was making work.
I didn’t feel a disconnect between the two things I was doing. It’s only looking back that I can see the distinction, at the time I just continued experimenting. I experimented until the problem solved itself, visually.
Arriving
My drawings started to incorporate more negative space, space that I fell in love with during life drawing and had appeared in my earlier wax pastel drawings. This time it felt different; loose and expressive. Overtime I stripped back the mixed media chaos, loosened the wax pastel drawings; and they merged, not consciously.
It’s only now that I’m realising what a long process this has been, and it couldn’t have happened any other way.
Slowly, something is slotting into a place. I won’t say ‘into place’- because I know it’s ever changing. But momentum has caught up and I finally feel like I’m arriving. It’s a pleasant feeling.
I really enjoyed this post as I feel similarly caught between expressive gesture and energy, but also feel a need to create The Most Perfect Line (or sweep of colour, in the case of my illustrations) and similarly love both the smudge and randomness of charcoal and other textural media, and the pureness of an exquisitely positioned single line. And I really like your use of negative space - there's something really exciting about white/black space and something that's very difficult to judge and execute, in my view.
I loved reading your story, it was captivating! Sometimes we have to look back and recognize our own path and the time things take, and that eventually everything has a meaning.