A Name for Learning Drawing in the Arching Skies.

A Confounded Letter about Skill and achievement.

 

Painted dogs on this today, a minor modern afternoon. Again boring through thoughts of simple incidents and clouds I could not remember. How to write or paint. Instead of which a sailed galleon cloud of a childhood spent looking up, gestalt tacked across this pedestal sky. Bearing with it meticulous stately considerations of guilty places and pains in memory. A remembering of old Shell song books, one between two. The wooden school valved radio hissing in the big glass light of beeswax classrooms. Playing those self same songbooks with illustrations all around. So the whole school was singing through the beveled glass of sliding doors with the light programme. Written all now in a single soft manner, no need to grapple with the cardboard cut out memories. The monochrome string section sixties attempting forever to fill my gaps. Working with my mind was better as I was told more than once. In a mill, mining town of working with craftsmans hands for someone else this was difficult.

The first time I had to learn the mathematics of numbers, not shapes, but he who never was anything but an amalgam of teachers, played his music instead. His Elgar and his Delius, wonderful and lightly drawn. You must paint your skill with your mind, he said, I think, in my head. You must draw everything until you can draw everything. Then say what you mean to say when you can think in that different, diffident, language. It is not a talent you have, it is a nothing but forgotten skill, plucked at constantly like erased sore pizzicato  fingers. It is the wish inside that keeps us wondering, what if, what was, is somehow? These wonderful, mad voices inside my headaches as they started.

 Not thoughts as the artist, they were more the craftiness displayed in dodging teaching. Avoiding Technical Drawing at all costs. They, who never existing anywhere, like complimentary colour invented, said. Not into God given gifts, they were the practice of short trouser remembering and drawing something later on any waste I could find. Once it was wonderful, like grass shimmers on a Sunday. All was meant to be seen and understood to bring into the sketch book box rooms of my minding.

Some smell of various painted pipe radiators, dome wire cage high lights and institutional colour. Clotted dipping ink and pink blotting.  Archetypal teacher tweed patches in these aformentioned classrooms. Those who did not know, but encouraged anyway. Greasy dandruff haired old men with nicknames and light, meatless diet knowledge with black lumpy mashed foods that were somehow funny and sad at the same time. Rising and falling in gales of hooted laughter and wave cries of subtle studied bullied indifference. Mentoring the mountainous, memorizing the mystery, mannered, mystical methods of these old ones and do it again better. Be certain and play it again. Until you know better, they said, in a whisper before I lost, thinking I did know better. His name was Drawing and it was the skilled use of my eyes, only. This, in fact, I did myself. Put it on the wall for everyone to ignore, deliberately.

So the blown glass grass shimmer and the cumulus grey changing spaceship like waiting of this petty grey rain coming afternoon is for him to understand and me to feel. Drawn in pencil and impasto coloured with wet rambling sprayed remembering.

Reviews

[...]

. i am stunned and speechless, monsieur ... those shades of blue in the photograph fill my entire being and tell me that there is beauty in art that is waiting to be discovered for the diligent and the devoted ... and your words ... oh ... your words are as beautiful as any painting i have ever seen ... i am just so grateful i'm getting to read them ... and to learn from you ... to be inspired thus is a dream come true and i thank you infinitely for being the artistic magician that you are ... thank you so much ...

[roarke]

this is what it is. thanks for putting it impossibly into words, yet not words. A magic sleight of hand in the mind, seen through the eyes, abled by the hand and back into the mind. And yet you bring it to life in a light I dare say it's never seen. Pure draughtsmanship.

[SM Davis]

We mustn't stop thinking about tomorrow as yesterday's cobwebs are brushed off the knees and we get up and consider mastering that which cannot be mastered. Life. I'm with Sue on this one. You have an incredible way of writing with vision as unique as the cloud formed skies.

[Ed Hart]

"You must draw everything until you can draw everything." Doesn't matter if we're at the keyboard or the pallet or reaching for a lover's hand, we must do it until we can do it. Then the world can't help but tell us how we've done, even if it's to our ghost. Life has nothing but teachers; how fortunate you were in this one...

[Ladysue]

You do have a distinct way of writing with a wonderfully descriptive vision. I really enjoy this one. Loved these lines,

Not thoughts as the artist, they were more the craftiness displayed in dodging teaching.
It is not a talent you have, it is a nothing but forgotten skill, plucked at constantly like erased sore pizzicato fingers

You have really some great descriptions in here, but these line jumped out for me.

Excellent expression!

[emmajoy]

Your writing takes your reader back in time when school was school - admittedly what I've been told or read about - but somehow and incredibly clearly you create the scene deliciously and how I wish I could have been there with you:

'Some smell of various painted pipe radiators, dome wire cage high lights and institutional colour. Clotted dipping ink and pink blotting. Archetypal teacher tweed patches in these aformentioned classrooms. Those who did not know, but encouraged anyway. Greasy dandruff haired old men with nicknames and light, meatless diet knowledge with black lumpy mashed foods that were somehow funny and sad at the same time '

As always and ever you write in your unique style about the emotion and involvement with 'Drawing' as a youngster.. your desire to see, to create: ' It is not a talent you have, it is a nothing but forgotten skill, plucked at constantly like erased sore pizzicato fingers '

Just re-read and smile because I recently went to see a school at Tyneham, Dorset, which is as it was WW2 time .. to retain the atmosphere a certain scent was added .. ' The wooden school valved radio hissing in the big glass light of beeswax classrooms.' - beeswax indeed!

I just want to read this over and over!

[Phibby Venable]

You have the most unique way of writing, Ken, this has such a desperate,
but sharply acute view to it..and the images are incredible. the way
you describe thing so real & descriptive, but in the most hard and beautiful way.

[Emily B]

I think I like this the best of all the confounded letters. I'm almost sure of it, just hedging a little in case something newer comes along . . .

[R J Askew]

I'm stumped. I don't know enough about art is about the only thing I can think of. Your piece makes me think I may have missed out on a lot. I also sympathise with teachers faced with kids who want to be anywhere else but in school. It is sad that Drawing went a-missing. I am not sure I have ever had anything I prized enough to notice I'd lost it. Ach, this is not a very satisfactory response, but it's the best I can manage right now.