Ironic that the most angsty pictures bring the most joy to draw. Or maybe just the law of averages, if most of them are angsty.
It’s been a slow year for drawing, but mostly for good reasons. Like spending 6 months doing a brewing course. It’s been a tough year for life, settling into a new normal that sometimes seems bleak, but fighting it and having some wins. Now there are no quiet Wednesdays on my own, to draw in peaceful solitude, I’ve learnt to carve out time and draw with the bustle of family breakfast around me.
I saw an old picture of the flower faerie growing out of the unnatural flesh, and thought about all the variations I’d done, about the layers of shedding, layers of renewal. Remembered an early sketch about confronting your own mortality, that a friend could only see as homoerotic.
This drawing had a slow and joyful gestation over a couple of months, with some wonky knees my only real gripe. I did at times wish for the freedoms of digital processes, to rejig the placement and colours without hard rework. But the accidents made it better, like starting the shadows with the wrong marker, making them way bolder and tying the figures together.
It’s about circularity, the possibility of regrowth, of new beginnings. But mostly about repetition, the seeds of the ending being embedded at the start.
Postscript: I didn’t get around to posting this until 5 days after writing the text… with a morning’s work experience mashing in, booking an interview for a brewing job, and a successful family Christmas in that time the outlook is a lot brighter!