October In Sketches

It’s Tuesday, four days since the launch my SketchPocket bags for sketchers who like to make art anywhere. I have prepared to sell none – as the saying goes, expect nothing and you’ll never be disappointed. But four days in, I have sold nearly two thirds of the bags I will have available this side of Christmas. This is fantastic news, but of course it could be that that’s it – maybe everyone who wants one has now ordered one. You just never know. My hope is that the lovely people who have preordered will wear their bags slung over their shoulders and the passing public will demand to know where they got such a useful bag…

Which leads me to remind you: a SketchPocket is just a bag. It is a bag that makes use of two laws of physics: gravity and Hooke’s law (elasticity to you and me), but I have put them together in a way that allows the user to sketch standing up. It has no batteries, or cables, or lights, bells or whistles. I love it no less for that, and I hope you’ll feel the same.

However, I have been so distracted by the launch that I have not written a blog for ages. Other than reporting on the workshop in Dunmore East and on the SketchPocket, I have not shared any sketches with you recently. October has been a rich month for sketching, but you wouldn’t know it from this blog. I am here today to make things right…so there follows my sketching diary for the last three weeks or so.

Thursday 10th October

I visit Enniskerry, the village of my childhood. I am to meet Lana Condron, who runs the Schoolhouse For Art with her father Neil, to discuss a class I will teach in the Schoolhouse. The meeting goes well and we make arrangements for the course: it will be called Make Art Anywhere and it’s about, well, making art anywhere. Afterwards I sit on the bench outside the Schoolhouse and sketch the clock tower in the middle of the village. Pulling the pen over the page to make the shape of the stone sides, my line connects the past with the present. I catch glimpses in my mind’s eye: scenes of days long since past.

Memory one: sometime in the early 1980s. A cold winter’s night, and I have just got off at the last stop of the no.44 bus from Dublin. The 44 is nearly always empty as we approach the last stop, and the driver whizzes that double-decker deep green bus along the country roads. Coming to a halt in the dark of the sleeping village, the bus appears huge. The stone clock tower looms dark and cold in the centre of the village. I am wondering whether to walk the three miles home, try to phone for a lift from the phone box next to the tower, or stick out my thumb to hitchhike. I sometimes end up walking the whole way. The one street through the village rises steeply from the bus stop up past the Protestant church and the cemetery where my lovely grandmother lies, towards the mountains where I live. The street lights stop at the church and it is pitch dark after that. I hate the feeling of starting out on my walk: it feels desolate, lonely and that my life is pretty crap. I often think of my schoolfriends, none of whom ever walk anywhere in the dark. On the way home there is a section that is walled on both sides of the road, and it’s so dark that I have to run my fingertips along the wall to keep a straight path. I am always frightened, not of unknown men (a valid fear) but of unspecified evil lurking in the dark (invalid).

Memory two: it’s the early nineties, and I am watching One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest in the immaculately clean and tidy home of a family friend, Barry. Barry is in his fifties, and lives in a beautiful Victorian house in Enniskerry village, on the steeply sloping street. He is blind and deaf, a man whom my mother befriended when I was about twelve. She transformed his life in the ensuing decades, not to put too fine a point on it, and continues to do so to this very day. I am now in my early twenties, and the TV signal isn’t great in my family home in the mountains, or maybe we don’t have the right channel or something. I am with my cousins from Canada and we are in Barry’s living room. Barry can’t see the TV very well but he is contented and smiling as his guests sit around and watch the drama of the movie unfold. The very sad movie ends and a few tears slide down my cheeks, but I control myself. When we leave, Barry waves us goodbye from his doorstep. He can’t see us, and his gaze is slightly above our heads, but his expression is one of such happiness and pride that I give up all attempts to control myself and sob noisily. I can see Barry now, a stong man, a gardener, his perfectly smooth skin with no worry lines, thinning greyish white hair, joyful smile, the most beautiful face a man in his fifties can have.

Today I walk through the village. It is a different place now, no longer quiet. There are chichi coffee shops (is that what you say?) and an antiques shop so choc-a-bloc with old stuff that you have to suck in your stomach to pick your way through the piles of chaos. I buy a blue and white jug, explaining to the very entertaining proprietor that I run an online sketching group and that my students will go crazy to sketch the little jug filled with spring flowers. “Can’t you just see mini daffodils in it?” I say, “or grape hyacinths?” “Bluebells!” says the man. We list a few more flowers that would look adorable in the jug. I also buy a little blue and white Chinese pot that will hold flowers and be sketched at some point. I ask his name and he introduces himself as Aladdin. The card takes a long time to process in the machine: the man says it will get to the bank, but must stop and have a coffee on the way.

I get the feeling the presence of the Schoolhouse For Art has transformed Enniskerry Village.

As I walk down the steep, pretty street in the autumn sunshine I think how grateful I am to be where I am now, light years from those lonely, confused days when I was a teenager who never fitted in anywhere. I know I don’t have any teenage girl readers, but I wish I could tell them not to worry if they feel like they’re different from everyone else. It’s a feature, not a bug.

Friday 11th October

Back home in Galway, I walk up the road to Tyrone House and sketch it in burnt umber alone…the students I taught in Artform, Dunmore East, found the values studies really useful, so I figure my online students will too (they do).

Then I figure I will make a vintage-style map of the locality and briefly explain to the class how I did it. They enjoy the exercise thoroughly. If you want to try it yourself, here’s what you do: search “vintage maps” and “vintage cartouches” on Pinterest, and choose a nice brown colour to paint it, so it looks like it was drawn in iron gall ink, kind of sepia. I use letter stamps for the place names (very inexpertly, I wish I could do that better) and my colours are from the supergranulating range of browns from Schmincke.

Thursday 17th October

A week later I find myself in Kinvara Village, down the road from my home, having coffee with a wonderful new friend. It’s a beautiful day, and after we go our separate ways I head outdoors to sketch. I see a red boat leaning against the sea wall. It’ll be a while before the tide comes in and sets it afloat again, but I am sitting / leaning against a cold metal bollard and I blink first. I leave for home with the sketch unfinished, and add a few bits of intense shadow back in my studio. I have memorised it – not difficult, the line in my head is “darken the wall next to the boat” – but I can’t stay any longer so it’ll have to do.

Sunday 20th October

I meet my younger daughter for coffee in Insomnia, a café opposite UCD where she studies. We are the first customers there; we meet very early, as she has to leave to start her shift at 8.45am. When she leaves, I sit there for a minute wondering what to do in the nearly-hour before I must hop in a taxi for the next appointment with my older daughter at the Ideal Home Show in the RDS some fifteen minutes away. Duh! That’s exactly enough time to get an entire sketch done! I work fast and without hesitation, and use supergranulating paints from Schmincke, because they’re really muted: i find that allows me to jump in with confidence. This is another class the students really enjoy.

I am extremely distracted by the imminent arrival of my SketchPockets: that is, persuading the factory to make time to produce a few for me in time for Christmas. The factory also makes handbags for a designer label in the US: they have priority, which is why I am only getting a fraction of my MOQ. I am not told the name of the designer – the factory is under an n.d.a., and all I can do is speculate. In all honesty, I can name about three US bag designers and I bandy them about to my designer, but he doesn’t know either. We secure 100 bags for the end of November, which leaves me just enough time to get them all out to the respective destinations if I waste NO time after they arrive. That means I must ensure 100 entire kits of “filling” will arrive in time to fill the bags: 100 sets of paints, 100 Sailor pens, 100 converters, 100 sketchbooks, 200 magnetic clips, 200 glass vials, 200 water brushes (2 of each per bag), 100 collapsible water containers and 100 white gel pens. I must have 100 swing tags, 100 QR codes that explain how to use the kit in the bag, 100 printed address labels. I am on my own in this venture (excepting the wonderful Ronan, my webmaster, and Stephen, my designer; then there’s my amazing family who are all cheering me on, so I am not really alone…).

Friday 25th October

Marcel and I are watching TV. The movie, the name of which i cannot recall, stars Gerard Butler as a vengeful monster and Jamie Foxx as a lawyer who puts expedience above justice. It’s incredibly gory for gory’s sake, and isn’t engaging me, so I open my SketchPocket and start sketching. It is always beside me: you know those kids in public spaces with enormous headphones and rubberised iPads? This is my version of those. I start to draw the ever-sketchogenic Marcel and soon I am lost in the process of sketching. The only trouble is that it means I am no longer watching the movie, and have to then keep asking Marcel to rewind bits and tell me what’s going on.

Saturday 26th October

I cycle to the garden centre in my village with Reuben in the basket on the front. I buy a selection of miniature ornamental gourds. They are hard to sketch but since I want to share them with my class, I must come up with a technique. I manage to find a nice way to break them down in a sketch and I am happy in the end. It involves lots of scratching around with a dip pen and green ink. After I am done sketching them, I arrange the gourds on the table down the centre, flanked by beautiful mixed small pumpkins that I mean to turn into soup, using the pumpkins as bowls. My son Paddy finds the warty garishness of the ornamental gourds quite repulsive, and he requests that I move them away from his placemat on the table.

Tuesday 29th October

More TV shows that are not engaging my attention. More turning to the Sketchpocket to drift off – this time on a flight of fancy. Don’t even know where this is going but I am loving it.

Wednesday 30th October

I want to put in a free class, as I would like to expand my Sketch Club a little. I have a lot of fun sketching the beautiful ceramic ghosts I have bought to add to the pumpkins running along the centre of my dining table. On the evening before Hallowe’en I have the class, adding a few bits of dolly mixture licorice allsorts strewn in front of the still life. I enjoy every minute of the class. (It’s still on my website as a freebie if you feel like having a go yourself.)

Saturday 2nd November

The woodland fungi have made an appearance at last. My eye is caught by something bright on the lawn outside my studio and it turns out to be a clump of pretty fungi. I have been waiting impatiently for seasonal mushrooms to arrive, and now they are here. I duck under the trees into the forest at the edge of the lawn and find a few more. They make a very pretty display on a sheet of paper and I get sketching. I do not include the shaggy ink cap I find at the edge of our front lawn, as it’s too big to fit into the compostion. But I do not throw it out the door back into the garden, and it is an unappetising mess of black liquid before too long. I know from experience that this will happen, and once again I pay for my laziness as I have a clean-up to do now too.

Throughout all of this I follow my newfound fixation for sketching local animals in period costume. I can’t say what is developing in my mind other than that (a) something is and (b) there aren’t enough hours in the day to fit all the frivolous artisitc activities I try to fit in it. But sketching the seasons as they creep along their inexorable path is my way of embracing the transition from one way of being to another.

See you next time!