Sketching Has Restored My Faith In Human Nature (Or Has It?)

Sketching Tells Me That People Are Better Than We Sometimes Think

I have often told people that sketching makes you feel good about humanity. That passers-by and onlookers are invariably kind and warm to sketchers. This article raises the possibility that I haven’t taken that on board, or not fully anyway. There are a few macabre themes in this article so it’s perhaps not for kids.

Berrying Season

Friday 6th September

Every year around this time, my brother and my mother head up into the Wicklow Mountains, near the east coast of Ireland: my brother to pick frockens (fraochán in Irish – they’re like tiny blueberries) and my mother to paint. This time I am lucky enough to be in Wicklow on the day they have chosen, and the weather is promised to be lovely.

We drive up into the hills, through the village of my childhood, climbing and twisting along a narrow country road, past the adorable tiny granite church where my husband and I got married, the road rising ever upward until the trees disappear and all around us is heath and heather, great rolling hills and yawning valleys falling away in the mist. The colours are soft, hill colour, but the mist has the valley under a grey pall.

We take a left onto an even smaller road, rising like a flat grey ribbon ahead. We pull in off the road at a level bit, an otherwise featureless stretch of verge, but there’s just enough space for my mother’s tiny blue car. Short, yellow-green grass, surrounded by hillocks of heather and frocken bushes, and, within twenty metres, a solid wall of forest.

We find a little clearing at the edge of the forest and the mist starts to burn off. Two plaid rugs are laid down and we have a picnic. It is excellent: my mother and I have prepared it together. Sandwiches, salad, smoked salmon, eggs, fruit. Piping hot tea and coffee, fresh cold milk and crunchy oaty chocolate coated biscuits. Then we each get down to business. My brother frockens and my mother and I paint. Our 20-year-old niece / granddaughter lolls about. The mist has cleared, the sun is shining and it’s hot. Soon I have changed into shorts and my brother has shed his sweater: in his flat cap and long-sleeved light grey tee shirt, baggy trousers and leather boots, his blonde curls emerging from the cap, he looks for all the world like Thomas Hardy’s Farmer Oak or a 19th-century yokel, out working in the countryside as he ought to be.

My mother and I paint all afternoon. It gets hotter. I daren’t give out about the heat because there isn’t an Irish person who hasn’t complained about the cold and wet summer we’ve just had, so I think I will sound contrary if I complain. I do anyway. The truth is, it’s heaven: the forest is damp and cool and mossy if I step a few metres away from the clearing.

But the forest is also a little eerie, the light flat and the trees almost impenetrable. The forest floor is thick with pine needles and there are neither flowers nor grass. It’s an unfortunate fact of life that people sometimes come to a bad end in these mountains, and the 1990s saw a handful of disappearances of young women: those whose bodies were recovered were found in these woods. It is another unfortunate fact that the illegal drug trade in Dublin leads a lot of young men to lose their lives at the hands of people whom they have crossed in some way, and again, these woods are where the remains are often found. In years gone by, when my family and I walked in the hills, if a dog bounded off the path in pursuit of something, my mother would follow, in case they were tracking the scent of a body. If she could help a family find closure, she was there for it. I found it thoroughly macabre at the time, but in hindsight it was a heroic and selfless aim, because no one wants to be the one to discover that.

But in fact, here in the woods, I am on home territory: my parents’ house, built in the 1960s on a steep hillside not far from here, was flanked on one edge of the clearing by a big gloomy forest through which you had to climb for some time before the trees cleared and one emerged into the light near the summit. The gloom of the woods was extremely scary, not helped by horror stories shared by the neighbours’ big red-headed lug of a brother, and I didn’t venture into the forest alone until my teens (even then, what was I thinking?). When I cast back to my childhood, in my mind’s eye I see glimpses of rusty, defunct farm machinery through the trees that I would investigate, and once I came across a well with one huge red frog swimming in it. I never found the well again, and we don’t have huge red frogs in Ireland; to this day I don’t know whether I imagined it, which is all the more reason to be suspicious of the woods.

The afternoon wears on and my mother and I finish our painting. My brother has picked all the frockens and our niece has long since had enough forest. As we drive away, I realise that I have left one of my pens behind in the grass of the clearing. I don’t think I will get a chance to return, as I am heading back West in the morning. But my mother is unhappy with her plein air efforts, particularly the heather she’s painted, and we decide to go back the following morning, at least for an hour. I will be able to retrieve my pen.

Saturday 7th September

The following morning the mist has returned, and the valleys are completely shrouded in amorphous grey clouds now. We climb up the winding road and I gasp at the beauty of the Wicklow Hills, the playground of my youth, in which beauty my young soul was mired. I have often wondered if that mystical glory led to my obsession with beauty now. (I know everyone in the world is the same, really, and artists gonna artist, but I am about beauty and not ugliness in my practice so maybe…). Everything is soft green, like a rainforest: ferns and foxgloves line the road, great trees rise up on either side, most of the houses invisible from the road, tucked at the end of steep driveways, walls of granite field stone surrounding them. At last we reach the spot where we painted the day before, and I pull my car in off the road at the same flat bit. There is already a car there, and there’s less room on the tiny patch of yellow-green stubby grass today.

As I kill the engine I hear the noise of a chain saw nearby. My mind leaps to conclusions of the worst sort, and I immediately wonder if someone is cutting up a body.

“Mum,” I say, “there’s a mechanical noise. Hear it? I think it’s a chain saw. Maybe someone is cutting up a body.”

Mum says she can’t hear anything, but her hearing isn’t what it once was. But I hear the noise drone on and on. We make our way to the tiny clearing at the edge of the trees where we painted the day before. The noise becomes a little clearer. We can’t see through the dense woods, but it feels quite close.

“I hear it!” says my mother.

I find my pen, and a brush belonging to my mother too.

“Mum, we should go,” I say. “It’s not safe. He will have to get rid of us too, now that we have discovered him.”

“You’re serious, aren’t you,” says my mother, who is happily unpacking her painting gear and getting ready to try again with the heather. “Go and take a photo of his car reg.”

I do, but the signal is very bad all the way up there in the hills. Eventually I manage to send the photo to my husband, at work back in Galway, and explain the situation.

“You’re funny,” he says.

I return to my mother.

“The noise has stopped,” I say. “I think he knows we’re here.”

We hear a gunshot and the sawing noise starts up again.

“He might be cutting up a deer,” says my mother. “If that’s the case, I just hope it didn’t suffer.”

Typical of my mother to think of the (past, over) suffering of a deer, rather than the (future, still possible) suffering of us.

“It’s too late now,” I add, thinking about my mother’s foot, which is healing from a break and still in a walking boot: she is not running anywhere. I look towards the source of the noise and some way off I see a small face with a black beard, bright against the dark of the trees. looking at us through the gloom.

“Mum! He’s peering at us through the trees!” I say.

A minute later the man appears from the woods. He is carrying a few logs.

“Hello!” he says brightly.

“Hello!” says my mother. “We were wondering what you were up to!”

“I was wondering the same thing!” says the man.

“That’s not much wood for all that sawing!” I say. He laughs and agrees.

The man is stocky, powerfully built, in his late twenties. He has tattoos and his black denims are very tight on his muscly legs. He is wearing a fitted blue jacket, and he has black hair and a neat beard. His accent is generic Dublin.

“Oh! You’re painting,” he says to my mother.

“Yes!” says my mother. “Do you draw or paint?”

“I used to,” says the man. “I never stopped drawing and painting when I was young. All the time. I loved it. But then I stopped…life got in the way.”

i am backing away at this point, because you can’t be too careful.

“Well, maybe you’ll get back to it,” says my mother. “I didn’t take it up until my fifties. My daughter, on the other hand, never stopped…you should see what she did yesterday.”

Okay, I think, I’m on. I am wearing my SketchPocket – of course – and I unzip it. It falls open to reveal the contents lined up like doctors’ instruments.

“Whoa!” says the man. “What the..?! Okay…now that’s serious!”

Even though I get this reaction a lot when I open the bag, I am still surprised when it comes (do I assume that young people have seen everything?) and I am really pleased. I show him yesterday’s sketch.

“That’s really nice,” he says. “Kind of childlike.”

He’s right, I know what he means. A bit Disney. Which I have no control over – it’s just the way it comes out – but I like that description. Then of course it goes to my head and I start to gush. I mention the worldwide community of sketchers whom I teach, who aren’t necessarily in it to make art for the wall, but more for the doing of it. I am about to tell him how you forget your troubles when you sketch when he interjects…

“Sketching is so therapeutic,” says the man. “When you sketch, time ceases to exist and you can’t dwell on your troubles. You can’t think about your bills…”.

“Or the fight you just had,” I continue, “or yes, your bills,” because that is my line.

My mother and the man continue to talk. He asks her how she hurt her foot. Then he asks how old she is, if she doesn’t mind his asking, and she tells him, and he says she is incredible for a lady of that age. This is not usual behaviour in Ireland and I am on the alert again. Then the man tells us his patrimonie – his parents are from Eastern Europe, and his grandmother still lives in the woods in the home country, growing vegetables and raising her own food. My mother and the man talk about how wonderful that is, and my mother remarks that we’ve really lost something (you’re welcome to it, I think). My mother, not Irish and like the young man not remotely reserved, asks him where he lives. He says he lives in a cottage nearby and knew there was a fallen tree here, so decided to get some firewood. It all tracks: the sawing, the questions, the unselfconscious openness, and as I assess the information, I start to relax.

After a couple of minutes of chat, the man silently disappears, and I am surprised he hasn’t said goodbye. Then I see him slip through the woods a little distance away, plastic grocery bags in primary colours in his arms, to go and fetch more logs. Then he is gone.

“Now,” says my mother to me, “aren’t you embarrassed?”

“On the contrary,” I say, “while you were telling him your entire life story, I was discreetly checking for blood spatters on his clothing.”

No response: she has turned back to her painting.

“There were none, you’ll be happy to hear.”

Time To Cop Myself On

Here we have a number of things going on: a man, an art lover, going about the wholesome business of chopping wood for his fire. A woman, also an art lover, warm and open-hearted and trusting. A second woman, one who preaches belief in one’s fellow man, suspecting the worst – the absolute worst – from that very fellow man. On that day, at least, it appears I got it very wrong. I do a little introspecting: perhaps I am not the serene person I thought art had made me.

Is it time to cop myself on? Do I meed to examine my conscience?

Or am I simply responding to the real, if extremly remote, possibility of encountering predators?

I’m confused: I have scoffed at people (mostly female) thinking they’re in danger all the time. Have I become that person?

My conclusion is that we were two women alone in the woods, there was no way to escape in a hurry and I heard a chain saw in operation in a place where people have come a cropper. So I have decided to give myself a pass.

Still, I didn’t expect the object of my mistrust to be a zenmaster art lover.

Meanwhile, if you prefer the art-only version of this story, I will have the day’s sketching up on YouTube later on today. You know where to find me!