Back to the Drawing Board

Tags

fern, Flash Fiction, illustration, writing

Every now and then over the past eighteen years my daughter has dropped me a hint. These hints come in the form of sets of pencils, nicely-bound sketchbooks, or little sets of watercolours. She has been gently suggesting that I might take up art again. I know this has gone on for eighteen years because that’s how long it is since I broke my left wrist. Painful and inconvenient, as you can imagine, especially for a left-hander like me. More pain and inconvenience followed when I developed a rare complication. It took nearly a year to recover, and I was quite lucky to regain the use of my hand at all. I thought my drawing days were pretty much over and took up photography as a more manageable form of artistic expression for someone with an unreliable hand.

But my daughter never gave up and nagged me (in the nicest possible way) to take up art again. I did try a bit of sketching sometimes, but the flexibility of the wrist and strength and steadiness of my grip were never really good enough. Oh, and ten years ago I broke the wrist again for good measure.

Despite all this, here I am drawing again. So what has changed? I have various theories about this,  including exercises I have done to improve my joints and the fact that nearly all my writing in recent years has been done longhand before transferring to computer file. Whatever the reason, my hand, which over the years has often felt as though it didn’t belong to me, has improved a good deal and begun to produce artwork again.

Now I have to admit that, for someone who regularly and happily puts her writing and photographs ‘out there’ in blog and book, I am surprisingly wary about sharing this art on a public platform. Perhaps this is because it feels more personal coming from the hand that has caused me so much bother for so long.

Anyway, here goes: may I present the harts-tongue fern, a plant of woodland banks and old walls, making its début. This drawing belongs with a little story called the Harts-tongue Inn, part of a larger work called The Herbarium. I have included the original photograph I worked from and the line drawing abstracted from it so you can see the process. It certainly seems to capture some of the magical effect looking at plants has on me. Not perfect, but not a bad start.

At present there are more than twenty of these little stories, each inspired by a different plant – so I have my work cut out if I want to illustrate them all. There is much to learn and explore, and I imagine this will keep me busy all winter. Wish me luck.

Oh, and thank you, dear daughter, for keeping up the hints. I’m putting the pencils and sketchbooks you gave me to good use at last. And yes, my battered, ancient drawing board is back in use too.

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William Morris and Me

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flowers, Happiness, illustration, William Morris

Something truly beautiful arrived through the mail over the weekend – a lavishly illustrated book about the life and work of William Morris, designer, artist, typographer and writer. This is a research item for the art project I have set myself to illustrate one of my own books.

I had been wondering why it is that I am so drawn to Morris’ luscious designs, given that I was a child of the 1950s, when all things Victorian were so deeply unfashionable. The answer is simple – I was brought up with them. I spent most of my childhood in a big, draughty Victorian house with lots of arts-and-crafts touches to its architecture. My parents couldn’t afford modern furniture so the house was filled with all sorts of old stuff, and much of it, the curtains, upholstery, carpets and ornaments bore the hallmarks of the William Morris influence. Those stylised flowers and richly-patterned foliage were all around me as I played. The spare, spiky, geometrical designs of the 1950s largely passed me by.

Little wonder, then, that when I began drawing plants in my teenage years they came out in patterns, leaves and flowers flattened and often two-dimensional, all my attempts at realism doomed to failure. It makes perfect sense now, and I have stopped fighting it and embraced my William Morris roots.

The natural patterns of foliage take on new meaning

How am I getting on, then, you ask? Very well, thank you. My first efforts were a rapid learning curve, but I’m starting to produce work I’m happy with. I’m looking at the natural patterns of flowers and foliage with fresh eyes, too, and writing and drawing are progressing in happy harmony.

I know I’m always banging on about doing the things you love – but honestly, the benefits to health and happiness can be amazing. You don’t need to spend a lot of money on fancy materials or invest a huge amount of time. A little creativity has a wonderful healing effect, I find.

I’m not quite ready to share the fruits of my labours with you yet – it’s a long-term project – but I will. We can’t all be craftsmen on the scale of William Morris, but we can all create something. Good luck with your own creative journey!

Reviving the Art

Tags

Dorset, illustration, writing

Jenny’s inspirational book

A couple of weeks back I had the pleasure of dropping in to a signing session at a local bookshop. The author was Dorset writer Jenny Hunt, and the book was her A Year on Chesil Beach – A Sketchbook. I enjoyed chatting with Jenny and bought a copy of the book. It’s a thing of beauty (and of wonderful observation) before you read a word – a facsimile of an artist’s sketchbook printed on heavyweight paper and ring-bound. It is obviously a labour of love, and, since I live close to the Chesil beach and know it very well, it touched me to the heart.

It also fired up an idea that has been mulling away at the back of my mind for some time. Why not take the plunge and illustrate my own books?

Well, you may ask, are you any good at art, then? The answer is that I was quite good at it when I was younger, though I had only limited formal training. Having said that, I had only limited formal training at writing, too – and I’ve never let that stop me. And so I found myself, the other day, purchasing a set of fine point pens and rummaging in a cupboard in search of drawing paper and pencils and nervously asking myself what sort of effect I wanted to achieve.

The answer, as so often, was staring me in the face: the lovely Q (for quirky) that stands in the heading for this blog. The plant-inspired stories I want to illustrate are highly-stylised, intricate, semi-naturalistic and faux-medieval. My Q is in the style of William Morris and the Arts and Crafts Movement – which is, er, highly-stylised, intricate, semi-naturalistic and faux-medieval – and also largely out of place in the modern, high-speed, throwaway world we live in. Perfect! That’s exactly why I like it.

The ideas began to germinate thick and fast, just like the medieval-style plant scrolls on Morris wallpaper. I have some intense research to do, and the work will be slow, painstaking and probably deeply unfashionable, if I can manage it at all. I don’t care. Will it be saleable? I don’t care. Will it even be printable? I still don’t care. It’s right for me, and hopefully I can produce something I love. Commercial considerations don’t come into it.

The first experimental drawing, based on one of my own plant photographs, is already taking shape. I just couldn’t wait to get started. So watch this space – I’m happy to share my experiments (successes or failures) with readers of this blog. I doubt I’ll manage to produce anything as beautiful as Jenny’s inspirational book, but it’s going to be fun trying. Life for me these days is not about being as good (or better) than anyone else, or selling things, it’s about the satisfaction of creativity. So here I go, it’s time for my own little artistic revival!

 

For information on A Year on Chesil Beach, see the website: http://www.archaeopteryx-imprint.co.uk/shop.php?product/page/117/A+Year+on+Chesil

Books for Free?

Tags

authors, free e-books, publishing, social media, writing

I’ve just read a cri de coeur on social media from yet another writer ready to throw in the towel. Not that she intends to give up writing, you understand – what she is giving up is the unequal struggle to make even a very modest living from it.

When I began writing novels I certainly never expected to earn a living from it – but even I was taken aback by the amount of effort (writing itself, promotion) that I needed to put in to receive even a tiny return. The increasing expectation for the written word to be provided for free, at least over the internet, certainly doesn’t help.

I have long since thrown in the towel myself. The struggle to sell reading material, even at a very low price, became more trouble than it was worth when it began to affect my health. I still have books for sale, all inhabiting the murky lower depths of the Amazon rankings – but I no longer put myself through the soul-destroying process of trying (and failing) to promote them. I write for fun these days. And in a sense that makes me part of the problem for the struggling writer.

Why is this? Well, my future writing is likely to be available for nothing. Anyone who wants a copy can have it. I might even serialise my work (I still think of it as work) on this blog. This allows me to concentrate on my writing without the stress of trying to run what is effectively a failing small business. It’s the only way forward for me.

If I were the only person in this situation it wouldn’t matter. But I suspect increasing numbers of people feel the same. The result can only be that the internet, in all its forms, is flooded with even more ‘free content’. It’s already easy to find free downloads of books (legitimate or not) and to read newspapers and articles of all kinds. This blog post, which takes time and thought to write, comes to you free of charge, my dears. No-one need ever pay for something to read – so why would they? Pretty soon only the best known authors will be able to get away with asking people to pay for their books.

So must we all go with this inevitable flow, or is there a solution for the struggling author? The only one I can think of is to give e-books away for nothing – and charge for advertising space, in the way many blogs (not this one!) already do. Many other kinds of entertainment, and the internet itself, pay for themselves this way, whilst making the content free to the user. What do you think? Would you mind finding pages of cleverly targeted advertising (I’m sure that’s possible) in your e-books if you received them for nothing? Authors and publishers already use the space at the ends of e-books to advertise their other titles – isn’t this just taking it one step further? The author then gets paid from the advertising revenue rather than directly from the audience. Does it matter? I’d love to know what you think.

Writing about the Elusive

Tags

memories, writing

I am trying to write about very specific feelings – the sort of feelings that surface, just briefly, when a memory is triggered: the smell of something takes you back to a time and place, or a sound that does the same thing. These are very transitory feelings, hard to hold onto and harder to describe. For instance:

When I think of a village I knew as a child – a place with a duck pond – it brings an instant sense of late-afternoon summer warmth, of the smell of the pond, the dusty colour of worn red brick. But there is something else – a sort of essence of childhood that is far harder to identify. The more I try to think of it by reliving the memory, the harder it is to find. So I am unable to express it in words – I can only feel it. This is deeply frustrating.

These elusive feelings often relate to nature (for me), and I have wanted all my life to pin them down, write about them –  in effect, show them to others. For instance:

The feeling I have standing before a wild hedge in a quiet country road. It is mid-spring, everything is growing furiously; it is late in the day, on the edge of twilight. The trees are darkening, everything smells damp and earthy and lively, the white flowers in the hedge-bottom glow in the half-light… You get the picture. There is a very specific feeling associated with this scenario, and I’ve felt it many times. I suppose it’s a feeling of being at one with nature. But it is so fleeting. I can describe the surroundings – but does that convey how it feels to be there, to a reader? I rather doubt it. And trying to write about it has made the feeling dissipate.

I have all this on my mind because my current work in progress is a rather arcane piece that I feel requires me to capture fleeting feelings of this type – temporary reactions, impressions, scraps of memory – and put them securely into words so they can’t fade away. This is proving so difficult that I don’t know if I’ll ever succeed. I have a feeling, though, that the attempt will leave me a better writer. I’ll let you know how I get on.