
Pearl the hamster taking an early morning drink before going to the office for the day.
2 mins
Vball
Notebook: Myrtle
“I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were.” – Joan Didion








We’ve had a rocky week here in the UK, ICYMI (unlikely).
There’s a lot of anger and resentment on all sides, and it becomes difficult to pull yourself away from the news stream because of the speed with which things are developing.
But we are where we are.
In a recent Guardian panel Paul Mason was asked to give one reason why he thought the Leave vote had won, he said this (I’ve typed it down as best I could from the audio):—
“Many people in this room.//who voted, like me, to remain will be going through a kind of existential crisis of the self, in the sense that the institution we have based our lives around is the EU. It’s the source of our law, it’s the source of our democracy, in as far as there is any, but also it underpins our opinions of social justice. Many of our life chances have gone, some of our young people feel as though their life chances are over, and our sense of self, of who we are, as europeans has been completely challenged by this.
Well.
That’s how it feels to be working class.
If in twenty years time your kids are offered the chance to ‘get one back’ against the people who did this to them, in one single vote, that’s what they’ll do.”
I’m hoping one thing that can come from this is that we learn to understand and listen to ourselves better as a country.
This is the first time I’ve managed to draw anything since last Thursday.
Windows in a public building.
Vball.
10 mins
Notebook: Myrtle.
I was talking to a friend yesterday about this kind of regular drawing and discussing if it gets easier as you go, if there are any patterns or systematic ways of doing each drawing that makes it easier as you go. But I have found that if I try and emulate a previous success it usually ends with a weak picture or a mess.
With each one of these I feel like I am starting again from scratch, like an adventure, and the ones that work really well are often those where I end with something I wasn’t expecting when I began. They transcend my plan.
I would like to experiment with materials more but usually they are done on the fly when I just have a pencil and a Uniball in my pocket. The onion picture below I did at home so had various different media available.
Here’s a useful post about the use of a dip pen.








