Making time
Hello Friends
I’m working on a large commissioned painting just now. Like most of my work, It’s slow process. Fortunately, my client is very patient.
There are many stages to the work as it unfolds: first, degreasing the surface of the aluminium panel I’m using, brushing it all over with size (glue) and allowing that to reach just the right stage of tackiness before applying the gold leaf all over it in small squares, burnishing this with a soft cloth over smooth glassine paper to ensure good adhesion, brushing off the excess leaf, spraying and brushing on many layers of sealant varnish to prevent the imitation gold from tarnishing, going over the surface with fine wire wool to give a ‘tooth’ for the paint to adhere to, then setting the whole panel flat on a workbench and pouring and brushing on layers of paint that must be left to dry naturally, a process that can take several days in this cold, damp winter weather.
Many adjustments of colour and tonal balance are made during this time, teasing and tweaking, layer over layer, adjusting viscosities, spraying fine mists of water or alcohol, all to create flow and texture. Plenty of pondering too. And that’s before I can even start the process of line drawing over the top of it all. I’ve been working on this piece since just after Christmas and I’m guessing it will take another month, at least, to complete.
This is not, you understand, a complaint. It’s merely an observation. This is what I signed up for: working with real materials, in real space, in real time, with hand and head and heart. When I was a young artist without means to rent a permanent studio space, and later, teaching full-time in academia with means but no time, I would dream of this. And I schemed and saved to finally make it possible to have the time and space to make this work. It still feels like a luxury. It is a luxury. I don’t take any of it for granted.
I’ve been reading James Fox’s new book, ‘Craftland: A Journey Through Britain’s Lost Arts and Vanishing Trades.’ The book is a reminder that, for previous generations, the work of making physical things by hand was not a luxury, but a necessity and a fact of everyday life. From dry stone walling to weaving to thatching to chair-making, people all over the land worked skilfully with the materials they had to hand, to furnish the everyday needs of their community.
We are rapidly losing this diversity of craft skills just as fast as we are losing biodiversity and for many of the same reasons. Fox argues that something vital and life-enhancing is being lost along with these craft skills. His stance isn’t nostalgic. It’s about valuing the intelligence of the hands, and how these skills build not just sturdy chairs and warm tweed jackets, but sustainability, self-reliance, community, resilience, and the deep satisfaction of unalienated labour.
But there is something else at work, I think, in the quiet space of making, and the daily devotions it asks of us.
The painter Matthew Burrows MBE recently broached this subject. He describes picking up a copy The Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis as a curious young artist, and finding something unexpectedly familiar in this devotional text from the early fifteenth century:
“What it spoke about — implicitly, rather than directly — was an embodied, attentive, disciplined way of living. A life shaped by practice, by repetition, by staying with the small and ordinary. And I recognised that. It felt wholly reflected in the context of my studio life, in the slow work of making paintings.”
This rings true for my own experience in the studio too, the repetitive rhythms of markmaking, the questions a painting asks of me, the quality of attention it helps me to cultivate, and the steadiness the work seems to offer me when everything else feels increasingly shaky. Words like ‘spiritual’, ‘prayer’, ‘meditation’ are so loaded with unhelpful baggage that I hesitate to use them in this context, but the humbler language that describes the ordinariness of a daily spiritual practice feels familiar to me. I wonder if it does for you too.
The Life Raft Creative Co-Working
Come and find some of your own steadiness, in quiet creative community. Join our weekly creative co-working session on Zoom. Our meetings are a little Life Raft of shared creativity in these stormy times. It’s very simple. We just say hello at the start and say what we plan to work on and then leave our cameras on and work together in companionable silence. We start at 3pm UK time and finish around 4.30pm. Just click the link below to join us. If you can’t make it live I share a recording to the paid subscriber chat each week.
That’s for all this week,
bye for now
Sam
This is so true, and so beautifully written. You have the gift of finding the right words out of the stillness of your practice that that makes this so resonant. I was sitting, drawing, trying to find my way back into ordered calm having gone down with 'flu and being unable to function even as I normally do with chronic illness, and this just quietly took me by the hand and led me to where I needed to be. Truly a lifeboat! Thank you.
I loved to read this. Both about the process of your work and also your thoughts on working with your hands, that truly resonates with me. In my home country Norway, a brain scientist just issued a warning about schools cutting down on lessons in carpentry, crafts and arts, due to reduced funding. He says that studies find these subjects are the most important for brain development. To be a brilliant mathematician you also need to learn to work with your hands.