A beach painting for grey November days

I was experimenting. With ways to work from travel photos, freehand watercolour  and taking inspiration from one of my favourite watercolour illustrators, Dorry Spikes, without well, you know. Wholesale thievery. Which I hope I didn't do completely. 

I seem to be quite glued to accurate drawing with perspective and all. Maddening, since I'm not even interested in making that kind of picture. I'd much rather not draw what I'm trained to 'see' but it's hard to lose, that traditional way working. So here, to come up with something looser, I just put in few lines for the beach and the mountain, and then started populating the page with teeny houses, beachgoers and agave plants at random and freehand over a few days. Like a jigsaw puzzle, and equally satisfying.

The painting is based on photos I took of Praia de Sao Juliao, a beach town about an hour's drive from Sintra, Portugal. I have a fantasy about spending a time in simple seaside place like this one summer.

Oh, how I would read on my shaded lounger, take early swims in the tidal pool before anyone was up, sift through the flotsam and jetsom, make friends with the cats outside the beach restaurant. Where I'd have the set lunch every day. Ah. To be in one simple place and learn its rhythms intimately, to watch the families and locals come and go. With the gentle Mediterranean sunshine all the while.

Notes on my weekly life drawing class.

It is so tempting to throw out the lot. And equally tempting to keep every one of the drawings in the unwieldy, growing pile of work that accumulates from my weekly life drawing class. Unedited, unloved. Under the bed, often, or in a folder propped up somewhere out of the way. A pile to be avoided for months on end (or years, used to be).

Ghosts of art school drawing crits linger therein. And charcoal dust. Smudged drawings. No good drawings. Can't remember if good or not drawings. So over it drawings. They hang about, those drawings, piling up week after week after my Friday drawing class.

I took courage, a few weeks ago, and had a good clear out, which was also a good look through, because it is actually quite lovely, to appreciate the work I have done. And to discern which drawings work and why, which drawings are not for keeping and which drawings point to a new way forward.

When I started life drawing again a few years ago, I didn't keep any drawings. I thought of each session as akin to a musician's scale practice and happily binned the results. Freeing, to know the sketches were just a record of a moment of seeing. Nothing to lose, and no pressure to improve, no need to evaluate even, at the time. A good way to dodge the ghosts of art schools past, perhaps.

The class could be what I needed it to be - just a process of turning up week after week with no expectations and getting on with some simple observational life drawing.

Now that I'm a regular (at the Friday morning sessions with London Drawing) I've found my groove again so that I now keep, and document, my work even while managing my expectations on the Must Make A Good Drawing front.

I'm learning to accept my drawings, even the not so successful ones. I value the effort of drawing for its own sake: I've turned up, I'm doing my best and that's good enough. It's been a way learn to be fine with making mistakes, a way to try new things and a way to learn to be patient with the days when I'm not really that focused and the drawings seem worthless at first glance.

When I take my recent drawings out and spread them all out in the lounge like this, I feel satisfied at my progress. And, in a good way, I see I have many more dodgy drawings to get onto the page, so much more to learn and so many reasons to keep giving it another go.

Meditation notes - drawing in the Kalahari.

Here's a drawing made in the shelter of a cool, shady bird hide at Nossob, a camp deep in the Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park, some 200 km outside Upington on the SA/Botswana border.

The hide has a view onto an expanse of veld and waterhole a few meters away. In the heat of the afternoon, there's just the soothing cooing of doves, perhaps occasionally the snap of their tiny wings as a flock takes to the air as one when the resident falcon swoops.

Drawing in the silence of the hide invites simplicity. The tree up ahead, the play of light and shade, soft scrunch of charcoal on paper, I'm content to just record this meeting of hand, eye and world. It's a kind of simple that actually takes a lot of hard work to trust as internal scripts play, unbidden. 'What is this for? Is this good enough? This composition isn't right. This isn't going to work out. This branch isn't right. I've got the angles all wrong. I'd best stop now, I don't do landscapes anyway'.

Ah, anyone who has listened to their thoughts for even one minute while drawing will most probably recognise these thoughts. On and on they play. The trick is to just let them come, and keep drawing anyway.

As in meditation. Thoughts arise, sheer delight! Pema Chodrun.

Another drawing at a waterhole. The beautifully named Cubitjie Quap. This time I was drawing in a car, a sarong tucked into a window to shade us from the hot-even-in-March sun.

The meditation of a nothing happening waterhole. In an hour, not much happened. A jackal came to drink from one of the silver puddles on the dirt road behind us, but other than that, no beasts. It had rained well previously so the animals didn't have such a need for the waterholes in the otherwise arid park. Just the breeze, the dunes, the jewel colours of the tiny resident seed eating birds. Sheer delight.

There were times for watching and photographing animals too: lion, an elusive leopard, bright yellow cobras and even a very sweet looking long tailed tree rat, though I drew antelope mostly.

I'm not a super seasoned animal sketcher, and it felt tricky to draw animals in a grazing herd, since they shift constantly, checking the breeze, nuzzling one another out of the way, turning this way and that.

I gave up on a perfect drawing of any one of them. Instead, sketching out in the veld turned out to be about applying lessons in confidence from my regular life drawing class. To commit lines rapidly, to keep looking, keep drawing, to keep trusting that eventually something instinctive will show up on the page. I wipe the page clean with my hands and start again, draw another layer, keep feeling my way, keep going in spite of the feeling of failure. Until it got too hot in the car, and the flies that  accompany grazing herds (and evidently, game viewers in their cars) got too much.

That and the thought of a cold drink under a thorn tree back at camp, the evening braai fire.

Perhaps my perfect antelope drawn from life is many Kalahari trips away, but for now, these drawings feel like progress. Like enough. I'm grateful for the privilege, grateful for the experience and glad I gave it a confident go.