Tuesday 15 September 2015

RAIN

The absence in blogging has been whilst on the boat for most of August. Sailing consumes all other thought. That is why it is truly recreational. All one's problems fall away, replaced by the immediacy of the many nautical decisions that need to be taken, problems which need to be solved.

Today, on land, at home again, it is rain.

Big Madam reports being invigorated by running in the rain. To me it is uninviting. I look at the two crane flies on the window. You can't tell if they are on the inside or on the outside. Jimmy spinners.

It is a day for looking out of windows. It is an interstice of a day - a day of gaps between other more important times. It echoes life at present. With the end of one major contract come questions about what to do next. Rush to fill the gap? Do nothing? Something rather different?

So what do I do? I flow back in the gap to childhood things. When I was a boy my Father used to bring home what I think were called pattern books - big thick things full of engineering data printed on white, blue and pink paper. They were brown paper bound. But the reverse sides were blank and that was their value as sketch books to me. I endlessly drew buildings. Skyscrapers, mainly, cutaway so you could see the use made of the space on each floor. Mine would have swimming pools, restaurants, gardens, living and sleeping rooms, gyms, velodromes, you name it. Occasionally I would have access to cartridge paper. Then my drawings would get much more finished and realistic. Not that they were brilliant. Having an artist as a Father was discouraging. He could flick his wrist and off could come a likeness that I could struggle for months to produce and even then fail. Remembered whiffs of this experience came this weekend, when Mini Madam was asked to produce a self portrait for school. I did one of her which was a likeness - mind you, even now it took me three go's. Hers was what a child would produce - some likeness, but not closely observed.

I find myself drawing buildings, as though a child. One of my boyhood cartridge paper drawings was of Norwich Guildhall. It has one façade finished with diamonds of black and white flint. Hard to approximate in a drawing, I remember. Again, memories of this return as I read Matthew Rice's book about vernacular architecture. He has a great map of the UK within it, like a geological map, except it maps the primary building material for housing. Brick, of course. Sandstone, too. Flint, in Norfolk, and in a  band running down to the Sussex coast. Best of all, a category he calls Random Rubble. Most of Scotland has this.

All drawing is really looking. Even when you think you are good at it, you quickly find you aren't. Relationships between shapes, shades, dimensions. You're almost always wrong. Thank God for rubbers, erasers.

Rainy days. Days for rubbing things out, looking harder, starting again.


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