Sketching Is A Forcefield

Just in case you don’t get past this line, if you’ve pre-ordered a SketchPocket and received an email from me, it’s just an automated one for all pre-orders to tell you they’re due to arrive in Ireland today to be sent to you over the next few days. I’ve had a few quizzical messages and I don’t have a way to get in touch with everyone…and if I try to respond to everyone individually then the SketchPockets will never make it to the post office!

Sunday 24th November

It’s a dreary Sunday. It’s dark today and raining. It’s just one of those infamous Galway days when you’re better off staying indoors. I know that if I sketch I will cheer up, but it’ll feel lonely to leave the bosom of the home with its three fun inhabitants – my husband Marcel, our son Paddy and the fluffy terrier Reuben – and head out into the wild to draw something pretty. There are a few cafés I could go to within ten minutes’ drive, and while they’re all very nice, I am having one of those slightly melancholic days and I don’t really want to go. But I have been meaning to practice more “transparent people” in busy places, so venture forth I must. Paddy volunteers to keep me company and I feel much better. He says he can bring his laptop and do a bit of work for his college project.

We settle down with our nice coffees and I get sketching. Paddy has to sit at the bench where the plug sockets are, so I take the table next to him. We give in to the temptation to get mince pies – the first of the Christmas season – but they’re warm and the whipped cream is melting, so I have to sketch extra-fast. All the slight melancholy I have been feeling is gone in a flurry of lines, and every now and then Paddy makes me look at the graphs he is generating: the flamboyantly creative shapes I see on the screen suggest his numbers are very wrong indeed. The shapes are very funny – like a chimp has tried to plot a graph – and I am happy to now know how funny a graph can be. Then a group of women arrive and I get my transparent people into the sketch. Normally I prefer to draw the entire background first, but the imperative is to draw the outlines of the people, so I draw them as I see them.

The staff are all young locals, and it’s lovely to hear their banter. Eventually Paddy says he smells soap, and soon I do too. It’s an industrial detergent and it’s pretty awful. It’s only then I notice that one of the servers is schlepping a bucket and mop across the floor and realise it’s time to leave and let these good people go home to their Sunday dinners.

A dreary afternoon holed away in my studio, feeling a little low, has become a memorable, creative and very enjoyable one. And the mince pie was lovely.

Monday 25th November

I join Urban Sketchers Galway in the town for their weekly meet-up. It’s a lovely group of enthusiastic sketchers. I co-founded the group in 2014 with Galwegians Donal Fallon and Jay Penn, and it waxed and waned over the years, fading almost to non-existence over the pandemic years. But with the help of some lovely people it kept going, to a greater or lesser degree, until last year when something suddenly “took” and the group took on its own momentum. Now they meet once a week, sometimes twice in better weather, and I feel very proud of our group. We even have our own chapter logo, which I’ve just made into a very cool stamp…I can’t wait to see it on the sketches of my fellow Urban Sketchers Galway artists.

However, on this day with them, I get very cold. I’m a hothouse flower and not built for the cold of Galway (or Ireland, really) and with my Raynaud’s kicking in my fingers go into their slide show of colour changes. First they’re white, then they take on a greenish tinge, then they turn an ominous deep purple-black, so I head back to the car. I have gone in to meet one of my students who is over from Canada but she never gets my messages and we miss each other. Frustratingly, she chances across the other members of Urban Sketchers Galway, but I miss her by five minutes.

I’ve always found red extremely difficult to use, but you’re not getting away with drawing a Christmas market without using red. I’ve learned a few tricks to make it look less jarring, like varying the shade and values of the red, and introducing red ink lines, but I am still a little frightened of red as principal actor in a sketch.

Tuesday 26th November

Every Tuesday I travel to Dublin by train, to teach a class on sketching in Enniskerry Village. There’s a really wonderful art school there called The Schoolhouse For Art – a converted Victorian school – and I am their newest recruit. My course, not surprisingly, is called Make Art Anywhere. Travelling up and down to Dublin provides me with lots of opportunities to sketch on the train. It’s always a fine balance between being close enough to see my subject properly, and being too close: I don’t want them to feel stared at. Which they absolutely 100% are. I like to think they would be joyful to think that their meat vehicles are providing the means to keep the demons at bay from members of the sketching public.

After class later that evening, in my parents’ living room, my mother tells me my elderly aunt has left this world, and that she must break the news to my father: my aunt has been his only surviving sibling for the last twelve years.

The next morning I head back to Galway to complete a commission. It involves portraits of a well-known sports personality and it is so hard to get the likeness right, in a narrow window of time before the upcoming ceremonies, but I get it together in the end.

Friday 29th November

Back on the East Coast again, in my parents’ kitchen. It’s the morning of my aunt’s funeral. Emotions within the family are running high. My father has a great many questions: he is anxious about some of the practical arrangements. I look across the breakfast table in front of me and I am suddenly at a different but similar table, and it’s forty years ago.

Step back in time with me for a minute…

The year: 1980. The place: the kitchen of a Victorian house on Herbert Road, Bray, Co. Wicklow. It’s my paternal grandparents’ house. I am waiting to be collected from school, or after a hockey match. I am sitting at the table in the middle of the kitchen, which has a teapot in a teacosy on it, on an oilcloth, and there are plates and cups on the table. This is the home in which my father, his brother and two sisters grew up. My father hasn’t travelled far, and nowadays he rents a building along an alleyway behind his parents’ house, from which he runs his sweater-knitting business. He is often obliged to attend to issues long after I get in from school, and so I spend a lot of time with my grandparents, either in the drawing room where we watch TV – cartoons if I’m lucky – or in the kitchen downstairs. There is a huge mirror on the wall opposite the short staircase that leads down to the kitchen, and throughout my teenage years I stare balefully at the disappointing reflection that greets me every time I nip down to steal a few biccies from my grandparents’ biscuit tin, stuff them into the pocket of my school blazer and sneak nibbles in between conversations with my grandparents.

The kitchen is small and cosy. There is an Aga at one end, so it’s always warm. My grandfather is obsessed with making jam and jellies from wild fruit, which must be genetic because I am too. His blackberry jelly is nectar, translucent purple-black and glowing from within. (I have yet to persuade a jelly to set in this way: I can do it with pectin sugars but they’re never clear and glorious like my granddad’s.) The textiles in the kitchen are gingham and white and there is a warm smell of scones, tea and something else that I can’t define other than to say it’s eau de grandparents’ kitchen. My grandparents do not talk to each other much so it’s always quiet in the kitchen, but not in a tense way, or not that I can pick up anyway. If I go out of the kitchen there’s a tiny bathroom, which is always cold, then a door to the yard (in which ne’er grew a blade of grass, as they both worked, as chemists). The yard has a door that leads down steep steps to their garage – Granddad drove a beautiful cream Mercedes with leather seats and green-tinted glass – and the garage opens onto the alley where my father’s factory is. This means he can nip up for tea break with his parents whenever he fancies. I love when his brother is there too. Bernard is very handsome, older than my father by pretty much the minimum possible: he is the image of my father, except where my father has red hair (“burnished gold” according to my father) and fair skin (“a ruddy complexion” according to his brother), Bernard has a tanned complexion and white hair. He went grey in his twenties, a dashing silver fox and strong young man in one. He married a beauty and had three beautiful children.

Bernard died young, in his early sixties, and their sister Anne died twelve years ago, in her mid-seventies. Now Gemma is gone too, and my father is shaken. I draw the kitchen because I want to reflect on the nature of time, but a curious thing happens. As soon as I start drawing, I feel calm. The scene is very lovely, with all those pastel colours and simple shapes, so it’s a pleasure to draw, but it’s more than that. I am able to respond to my father’s questions and anxiety-induced worries with far more gentleness than I usually have. In fact I am happy to be able to offer reassurance to my father at this moment.

But the moment turns out to be an oasis in a VERY emotional day: that’s family funerals for you. Yet again – I unfortunately have plenty of form – I make the wrong call as to what parts of the ceremony I should attend and which I shouldn’t…you know what I mean. I listen to conflicting opinions and choose to follow the wrong ones. I can’t shake the awful feeling of having hurt family members and missed an important family occasion. The best I can hope for is to drown out the brainworm that won’t stop playing on loop, and hope that in time the thoughts will recede into the background.

And I know that for as long as I am sketching, I have access to a forcefield that will protect me.

Join me…

I have a busy teaching schedule for 2025 so you have lots of opportunities to learn how to develop your own forcefield. All through English unless otherwise stated.

• Róisín Curé’s Sketch Club: now until June. Live online, Mondays 7-8.30pm GMT, Tuesdays open chat online 7-8pm GMT.
• January to mid-June: “Make Art Anywhere”, Schoolhouse for Art, Enniskerry, Co. Wicklow. Every Tuesday afternoon 2-5pm.
• March 14th-16th: Barcelona SketchFest 2025 (in Spanish)
• April 23rd-30th: “Concertina Sketchbooking”, Lagou Raxi, South Pelion, Greece
• May – two sketching courses in eastern Ireland, watch this space for announcements
• May 30th – 2nd June: Kinvara Plein Air 2025, Kinvara, Co. Galway
• August: I will be in Poland for the 2025 USk Symposium, either as an instructor or as a participant
• September 19th-21st: Light and Shadow in Watercolour, Artform, Dunmore East, Co. Waterford
• October 18th-25th: Atelier Clos Mirabel, Pau, France

And whether you’re sketching solo or with me –

I still have a few SketchPockets left but I am down to a handful of black ones and almost no white ones. So please order yours now if you want it this side of Christmas: https://roisincure.com/product/sketchpocket-black/ and if you’re in the US or Australia and need it before Christmas please tell me, as I will make an extra effort to get it to you as soon as possible.

SketchPocket Saga on YouTube

I’ve been charting the countdown to the arrival of my SketchPockets every day via YouTube Shorts. One minute each, a teeny window into the workings of a brand-new one-woman business venture (with of course the lovely Ronan who makes everything run smoothly). Check it out!

See you next time – and happy (and calm) sketching.