Writing sea poems without words
After a couple of weeks of lots of words, in conversations, books and writing, it’s been high time for me to get back to the drawing board, literally.
But I haven’t been able to find the usual calm drawing energy for the kind of very controlled line work I’ve been doing lately. Something felt different. I felt different.
Maybe it’s the wind that’s been blowing for days here, thrashing the daffodils to rags. Or maybe it’s the unsettlingly weird spectacle of a millionaire in a golden pumpkin carriage being draped in gold and fur and diamonds with, apparently, the full blessing of God. Or maybe it’s reading about the huge, off the scale ocean surface temperature anomalies currently being recorded. Or about the plight of our dredged-to-death inshore waters.
Samantha Clark, Sea Poem 1, 2023
The marks that came as I began to draw this week refused to be obedient or calm. The lines came out jittery and uncertain, awkward, a little raw, a little vulnerable.
Samantha Clark, Sea Poem 2, 2023
But they seemed to want to say something. I found myself writing scrawling, illegible love letters to the sea.
I’m not quite sure about these drawings yet and I thought about keeping them to myself for a while. But I realise these are drawings of uncertainty, of not having the right words, of testing the waters, of wanting to say something heartfelt but not knowing quite how. And that not being quite sure is actually the whole point.
It doesn't matter what stage you are at in a creative career. You will never be sure. Indeed, the moment you are sure is the moment you fall into a dead formula. David Bowie put it best:
“If you feel safe in the area you’re working in, you’re not working in the right area. Always go a little further into the water than you feel capable of being in. Go a little bit out of your depth. And when you don’t feel that your feet are quite touching the bottom, you’re just about in the right place to do something exciting”
Samantha Clark, Sea Poem 3, 2023
Also, I realise that letters need to be sent.
So I am sending these little drawings out into the world.
They feel like a bit of a sea-change. I’d love to know what you think.
Hi I’ve recently subscribed to your Substack (still trying to figure out exactly how Substack works to be honest,) and when I came upon your Substack I immediately loved your writing and resonated with your art and words…. Just now I saw this post about “sea poems without words,” WOW!!! I felt a rush of understanding, and overwhelming sense of how connected you are to this remarkable place at the edge of the world where you live.
I find myself asking as an artist “wannabe,” what poems without words do I have in me? Can I too manifest into creation the beauty that I feel and experience from nature into “poems without words?”