Sunday 20th December - Catching up on drawings

Feel free to skip this post as it is only about drawings (and a few comments)  

I've not been very methodical about keeping the sketchbook going - all kinds of things have been falling to the wayside, especially at the beginning of the month when we were far more concerned with my father's health (he's now back in his flat after a couple of weeks in hospital). So there re about six or seven empty pages. I just fill them up when I'm in the mood.   

Today the sky was black and threatening. I've usually got my sketchbook upstairs beside my bed in the morning, which is why so many sketches are of the early morning sky. The down side of this is that if I do a sketch, I will use fountain pen ink, and maybe Derwent Inktense pencils which you use water with to turn them  - inky.

(Saturday's page will get something added eventually!) After I'd spent a short while looking at the inky lines, I took a brush and went over the lines with water - I couldn't check the scene outside the bedroom window because the clouds had thinned and pale blue sky was showing through the gaps.

Here's another dawn from earlier in the week. I copied the sky, but added trees and a hill top rather than the tangled arrangement of houses and rooves and television aerials and telephone wires that forms my view.

I'm trying to work out how I want to use the sketch book; do I want to journal my day?

That would mean using just an ink pen to draw in bed, instead of reading a book.... I write a page-a-day diary, but there's not much space for sketching in it, and the paper is completely unsuitable for watercolour. (Watercolour paper isn't that wonderful for ink...)

I am pleased with this page;

The Advent book I am reading is reflections on poems by R S Thomas, put together by Carys Walsh. The poem for last Sunday was this one

Wrong?

Where is that place apart
you summon us to? Noisily
we seek it and have no time
to stay. Stars are distant;
is it more distant still,
out in the dark in the shadow
of thought itself? No wonder
it recedes as we calculate
its proximity in light years.

Maybe we were mistaken
at the beginning or took later
a wrong turning. In curved space
one can travel for ever and not recognise
one’s arrivals. I feel rather
you are at our shoulder, whispering
of the still pool we could sit down
by; of the tree of quietness
that is at hand; cautioning us
to prepare not for the breathless journeys
into confusion, but for the stepping
aside through the invisible
veil that is about us into a state
not place of innocence and delight.

The poem, especially the last part, made quite an impression, which is why I painted the picture and copied out part of the poem.

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