Drawing is an essential element in most artist’s repertoire. For some it is a daily compulsion, while others view at as necessary skill. I’m somewhere in between. I understand the joy that drawing can bring - but I don’t feel compelled to get my pencil out on a frequent basis.
Below is an ever changing selection of my drawings. These are my current favourites.
Who doesn’t like a good spiral?
Nature applies mathematics to create an aesthetically pleasing, super strong structure loved by crustaceans the world over. The ammonite drawing is almost a metre across. It is based on a drawing by the evolutionary biologist Erich Haeckel.
He was absolutely certain that the human race was divided into four sub species and that, with some judicious culling of the weaker species, humans could aspire to perfection. It was the foundation of eugenics.
I wanted to balance this hideous conclusion, borne of a mixture of ignorance and certainty, with the words of a contemporary of Haeckel, Hans Maria Rilke. In his ‘letters to a young poet’ Rilke encourages his protege to embrace uncertainty and let the answers come to him.
On each of the 86 nodes of the ammonite I inscribed the following words.
I beg you dear Sir, as well as I can to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue.
Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them.
And the point is, to live everything.
Live the questions now.
Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.
Rilke himself was only twenty seven years old when he wrote them.
Night Life
I’ve never seen the Farnham Kebab Van arrive during daylight. Perhaps it is an space ship and for the last 10 years I’ve been eating delicious fresh Turkish cuisine prepared by alien chefs.