Mornings.

He sits, his fingers playing the strings of an imaginary instrument. For now he is absorbed in the world inside his head - the plink and plonk of emotion that draws something from within. Crescendo and diminuendo play out in his eyebrows. This is how he enters the day.

Beside him sits a model in all but job, caught in his thoughts and dreams. Brooding eyes and angular features reveal his worry and anxiety, while his labourers clothes hide his feelings. Sporadically his eyes flash with the passion of anger that gives a glimpse into the argument that rages internally. On the outside arms and forehead are scrunched defensively, threatening a protection, in fear of the world that looks in. 

Standing to my left a woman bites her nails as pensive eyes flicker around  the carriage aware of who and what lies around. Maybe she seeks to avoid missing her stop again - a second time being too embarrassing for an office that has not yet embraced her worth. Or maybe she is being followed and she has seen him on the carriage and seeks to make her escape from the door. As we pull up to the stop she readies to bolt. 

The crowd disperses as we draw out of the tunnels, and the signs of dawn are conveyed by the slow drawing of a watered brush across the night, thinning the black to a bluey grey; broken by light yellows creep into the sky - mingling to reveal blues and reds and whites. The camera pulls back on the streets turning closely lit pools to wide angle panorama of terraces and slowly waking commerce. Curtains are drawn back, shops are opened, cranes begin to move and people begin to stretch.

Is there insight to all this? I suspect not really. Though this week I start work early, so the painting is lost to the evenings - maybe I need to wake my imagination at day break and indulge myself with creative nourishment? Without the flourish of my fingers and wrist with pencil and brush I find the dancing words and idle speculation my best hope for a satisfying breakfast that will see me through the day. I tuck in.

The game.

An early morning commute. Dark skies as I walk through what's left of the night, then to the train, and it occurs to me that we have extended our houses to corridors of neon and travelways of fabric seats with lit carriages and dashboards. Home to hub to transport to work.

The outside begins to wake up as my eyes adjust to the creeping light. Sunrise brings a palette of pink and purples as the clouds splash over the growing light. The sky plays tricks with perspective, creating layer upon layer and reaching back further than feels comfortable. Wind moves the wisps into streaks and then into Islands on which worlds may exist. These are world in quicktime, their civilisations rising and falling in seconds as continents drift and evolve; the plate tectonics determining wars, governments and art.

This Ariel geography ripples across the sky and I reflect on a weekend of travel, revel and excitement. I have returned from an adventure - night journeys, cheap hotels, a city en mass and the woman I love. A rugby international, something I have long wanted to see: waking in the morning, walking to the city - becoming part of a tide of others; spotting the rival colours sported and hearing the harmony of accents. It begins, as is typical of my life, in a pub. I drink the drink, hear the voices, the discussion, the anticipation.

Then the street: vendors, queues, more pubs - another drink, and another. There is warmth now, and nudges and spills are well met and give rise to acknowledgment and halloos. The day builds in excitement - consideration and prediction of the game with photo ops, selfies, silly hats and scarfs. Faces are painted, tribes evolve, and we get closer and closer to the stadium. People pour in from all directions, music is played, food is prep-ed, and drinks are pre-poured, ready for the rush. 

Then the stage and the theatre. The field stretches out its fingers painted with big screens and neon advertising. The roof is shut, the atmosphere enclosed and beginning to murmur. The players practice, the crowd moves from bar to seats. Music basked in tradition and popularity calls out. The noise is expected and elated. The gladiators arrive surrounded by fanfare, explosion and flames. Anthems are sung, memories recalled and created, then - almost too soon we are ready to begin.  

The game is hard, is physical, is frenetic, inspired and frustrating. The crowd ranges from the ridiculous to the sublime:-drunken expostulation, enraged shrieks, sage commentary and culminating in beautiful harmony as the game draws to the end. 

Having had our fill we stream out, amongst those dressed for the weather and those dressed for the night, to refill the pubs and bars. We go to watch the other game, to pick apart the experience, to make memories of what we have seen. 

We watch lives around us together, filling in the gaps in our knowledge with speculation and imagination. Flagging now we drink on, before a walk back in the rain - accompanied by song and dance (not in tune, and stepped with no skill) and fall gratefully into a sleep inspired by exhaustion, drink, excitement and the glow of the adventure. 

The clouds have moved in quick succession, pulling myriad faces as the whim of emotion pulses through them. Beneath we are left breathless, but happy.

Holy grail.

At last today is here. The bags are packed, and I have only a quick (ha! metaphor) shift to go before we set off. Tonight we drive into the storm in order to make our way to the final citadel where dragons lie; they have awakened.

There is a night journey, feasting and a grand tournament to watch. Increasingly this weekend tingles with excitement and a distinctly medieval flavour. Thus this becomes a quest - if so what is our object? 

We do not wish to slay any dragons - indeed we go to watch them roar and take flight - unleashed, unabashed, frolicking in their natural environment. Do we seek a holy grail - a panacea to end all ills and grant eternal life? If so I fear we are to be greatly disappointed. What then do we go for? Fr the occasion, for the memory, for the taste and flavour of the day - the city, the stadium, the game. To witness such a game in the midst of thousands, to become a part of that day in our own small way.

So our quest object is not tangible, it will not be what we bring back in the boot (though who knows what mementos we might obtain) - it cannot be grasped. No it will be what we bring back in our thoughts, our sense of the day(s) and our imaginations. For it is here the day will grow in the retelling, in the narrative of re-membering. 

I look to the weekend, to what will take place and how that will be. I ache to be a part of it, to witness the elements and the masses first hand - sketchbook and pen in hand. I seek the tension of the build up and the release of kick off. But I also look for the excitement of human experience, for the sensation and memory of the day, the food of imagination - the bread of heaven. 

Pie.

The cold has settled, sliding itself through to the bone and making camp around the nose and cheeks. One project trickles to an end, so others raise their hands - gloved naturally, in sigh of the season. Though chilled the light is spring length and calls out for reinvigoration. 

I have stocked up on supplies - canvas, sketch pads and pens. I am looking onward - so enthused, I stop in a pub and order a pint and a pie. This is food of warmth, and also determination - for after a pie the world feels better, more manageable and compliant - or is that the pint?

So I drink in the moment, stomach sated and head fuzzy. Light inside is soft, while the cold draws out the white in the buildings around me. The pub lies in an alley, with moments of history hinted at in the surrounding buildings. Red brick, old brick, arches and plaster dot around - all with a sense of having seen it before. Inside wooden floors and tables play with arty lights and stylised handwriting. 

Slowly people are appearing, twos and threes replacing the one offs like myself who sought refuge over a late lunch. I quickly move to sketch whilst there is material to use. Now faces start to glow in the lights as they order the latest pint - and I am aware that I have occupied a booth for six... I'm fine with it. More faces, and my hand starts to itch with the desire to sketch looks, postures, scenes, lights and flickers. 

The pie has gone now, but my glass is still half full. I have time to take this in; time - a wool of cotton that can be drawn and spun into new garments as the weather takes us. I sip another sip, there is warmth and the fruity undertone of barley and hops. The music is mellow and takes me to summer fields that are to come.

A sign advertises the six nations, and I smile. I look down at the menu... Oh, go on then.

It's coming.

The week is ticking down now to a big weekend. The pages are completed daily, work is worked - with its myriad of successes and annoyances, and slowly the days are peeled away leading to Friday and adventure.

I love the sense of anticipation, it cuts through the fog of illness, rising in mountain peaks through the cloud line. Up here the air is bracing and fresh. You look down with renewed perspective, and a sense of awe as the range of possibilities stretch to the horizon in crags and spires, speckled in spacelight and absolute shadow. 

All the excitement makes today an interesting day. Wednesday, mid-week, the half way point between the fading of last weekend and the building of the next. Today is swimming in marmalade - the sweetness is oozing around me, but every now and then comes the sharpness of the bitter peel, and the tang of acidity. Movement is slowed, but effort is redoubled, knowing that it will get me through this sticky Time that cloys me to delay. 

Coupled to this is my reluctance to get carried away should I jinx the adventure with hope and expectation. My aim is to sneak my excitement through customs so that by the time it notices it is too late. So in the mean time I continue as normal, attempting to avoid mention or exuberance about what is to come. 

Thus I ensure the page is finished, I make my way to work on time, I do what I must do; but inside I am coiled and ready for a day I have long imagined. The experience is sweeter as it comes as a present from my wife and I get to share it with her. 

Again the voice of my inner pessimist (though this is wrong, for he sits upon my shoulder like a malicious parrot) whispers 'what ifs' of disaster and disappointment, tells tall tales of dreams that are destroyed by the drop to the ground. But I grab his beak and smother the noise. 

This time my natural predilection for doom is quelled by the knowledge that the adventure itself will make the weekend, and the experience will be what it is. Either way I will be with the person I love - that is the true adventure. 

Blurreg!

I'm staring at a blank screen today. Basically I'm scraping the barrel of my mind for today's topic. Between illness (I have big balls of gloop escaping with every cough), and a worry about repetition, I find myself hesitant.

Drawing was zen this morning - but precisely because I was able to let my mind go blank and my hand work according to previously scribbled thumbnail sketches - just as well, as working out composition may have blown my head off. There is satisfaction that I have the muscle memory and instinct to create images that I am happy with. At the heart of my work is a love of drawing - of line, and of the freedom of scribble. Sometimes it is the patterns that flow across the page from a dancing pencil that give most pleasure. My drawing is Jazz - improvised and swirling, then jagged and piercing, alone and lyrical, then thick and close. My automatic drawing can be fun, but this time it is nice to see the development around a theme - now I add branches and leaves, now details to a basket. These are additions, textures that bring the scene I am sketching to life.

My fuzziness is compounded by the lingering effects of the weekend - the days planning were not dry, and the party most definitely not. My immune system is therefore still cleaning up the debris, and as people who  are given too much work to do by others are wont, has decided I  too must suffer. It has a point so I don't argue - that would involve loud noises.

So my hand and pencil work, touching lightly as the initial sketch is recreated, then reinforcing pleasing movement, or fussing with inspired detail. The pages taking shape are surveyed, and key lines identified for inking. The bend of a line narrowed to the one that hints at a hidden spring of intention as the story is honed down to the needs and wants of this moment.

Yup I feel like shit, but fortunately I don't have to get involved today. 

Finally there is the finished drawing before me. The action is complete and elevates the text. It needs inking and colouring, but that is not for today - those are jobs with precision and thought. I'll wait till my brain gets back for that. 

The birthday party.

Events are made of memories - those created in the spur of the moment, and those that have mulled over time adding richness through the eyes of others and spice from the recollection of details missing or another's point of view.

A family 'do'; the celebration of a nonagenarian. The room filled with moments from his life and I find myself watching as faces become memories - places, events, smells, textures and turbulence. Yes I remember, yes I recognise - and I do, I really do. The event has been staged, been managed, with everything that goes into such a thing:- inspiration, anxiety, good intentions, bad communications, conversations, consternations, deliberating, scheming and worry. 

But now the ball is rolling, the event spiralling: there are greetings, introductions, games are made and played, plots are in action, there is entertainment and distraction. There are faux pas, and toasts, silences and laughter, but most of all there is the sense of a life lived through the people who remember this or that. Remember that house, that slide, that school and when you tripped, fell or tumbled. Now here you, we, they, are better, survivors, remaining, basking. Drinks are drunk, food is eaten, memories spill and mingle with the pools left on tables - elaborated and exaggerated as the facts become part of the myth of a life. 

Children play in freedom and cheer, descendants of descendants, and the lasting echo of a life that has seen so much, and touched so many. They play rough, they tire out and perk up again despite themselves, they dance unconcerned even as awareness dawns upon them. 

The evening is slow to end, as people drag out one last moment, one last plan. But one by one goodbyes are made and delayed, connections have made connections, neurons have opened new pathways letting the memories breath again and flourish in another's mind, the circle has been invigorated. 

Then the tidying, the polishing, the disguising of the night. Equipment is folded, scraps are collected and collated, decoration is disguarded. Couriers are arranged and escorts designated. The party, now infected with the moment of a life, goes off to spread the memories even further in bars, houses, bedrooms and kebab shops.

The event has evented and we are spent. 

Marks on the page.

Some of my favourite work won't  really be for consumption by others as it doesn't really shape up as a work. It's my sketches of people passing in the street.

They work simply. I get a coffee and a window seat, open my A6 size pad and sketch random faces and bodies as they pass. The results sprawl across the page, overlapping and varying in accuracy. Sometimes it's the face that is spot on, other times it's the attitude or sense of movement that captures the passerby. 

I doubt any of the people would recognise these as portraits, though there is a definite sense of place and purpose in the sketches. I love them partly due to my own nosiness into the lives of others, and partly because they sum up a place and the variety of its people. Nobly heads, grace, gallump, pace and ponder, hurry and hesitation, carefree and anxious; these are all the qualities that show as people move from a to b, occasionally stopping for a coffee. 

As the day changes, so too the posture and the expression, faces screwing up and bodies hunching as the rain begins and blossoming out with a break in the clouds, relaxing and setting as the time for work goes and comes. The wider society written in the body. 

Are these Art - I think so, but they don't present as finished objects - pages in a small sketch book with fragments of people scattered across the page un-thought out, yet forming their own sense of logic as shape and distance arrange the figures and faces within the composition. Some figures are detailed, others merely a few lines - some faces are caught, others tell all in the shrug of their shoulders. Eyes, noses and mouths are optional, legs a luxury and hands unheard of. Yet these are defiantly people - an essence, a resilience, a vulnerability; an expression of what makes us more than our component parts.

It is the randomness that attracts me I think. On these pages sit people who know nothing of each other side by side, they contrast, reflect, reassure and expose qualities in those around them. Idiosyncrasies are the order of the day, and such juxtapositions - happy accidents that they are, are the delights that spring from these marks on the page. 

Back to, well, now...

I'm trying to get ahead of myself by writing a blog before I've published the last. This essentially means I'm trying to write something before the experience has taken place which will generate the blog in the first place.

So the question that arises for me now is whether this is a dangerous time paradox that will ultimately lead to the end of the world. After all it does seem that I must write this after I have gone through the process of writing it in the first place so that  I am able to write it in the future.

Okay, so this is beginning to resemble a bad remake of "Back to the Future", but it draws me to the idea of how imagination works within and wih time. I an effectively creating a doppelgänger of myself to thrust myself forward into the future to be able to to look back on myself writing this blog. A doppelgänger who is ostentatiously me, but who has lived an extra twenty four hours of life - what has he seen and done? 

In all probability not a hell of a lot, but the difference in time provides a space of possibility. It is possible that he has painted a masterpiece - that the ideas nagging at the back of his head have amalgamated to create a beautiful fusion on the canvas. Equally he might possibly have descended into despair - drunk a bottle of whiskey and destroyed paintings he has created. Both of these are unlikely of course - maybe he has found himself in the middle of a multinational conspiracy and has been forced into hiding, or won the lottery.

All of these present problems for the blog I am writing now. Thus if I am to write the blog for tomorrow today it must be a symptom of a degree of satisfaction, or confidence about the present. Obviously I've no problem with a couple of those scenarios, but on balance I think I'll have woken, drawn, made honey and lemon (with cloves, cinnamon and cardamom mmm), drunk, slept and be on the way to work

Assuming I haven't destroyed the world of course. 

From a distance.

The tide of illness ebbs and flows. One moment the sky falls on your head - a mugginess descends on your thoughts so that listening to others is a chore and constructing a sentence  needs a bulldozer; then there is a cloud break and thoughts bask down on the barren mind. This post is not going to be about illness, but it may help to explain the variations in quality.

I'm illustrating the words of someone else at the moment, and it's fun because I get to look from the outside in. I've enjoyed the character design and the creation of the landscape, but what I'm loving most is the potential of perspective. Playing with distance and the viewer's point of view can make even the simplistic scene more dynamic and interesting. Of course it can also make it a bitch to draw! This is not just about identifying the vanishing point, but about how placing the viewer just off centre can give the still image a sense of movement and dynamism - an almost filmic quality, which I love to see as it makes the page jump out at you. 

The power of perspective was brought home to me in Rome in the church of Saint Ignatious of Loyola. This is a church built for the Jesuit order - a fairly... fundamental branch of the Catholic Church. Now any self respecting religious order in Rome needs a building to match their ambition, but the Jesuits are big on abstinence and live austere lives and all that - plus they lacked the cash for a huge basilica, so what did they do?

Well the roof of the church is flat, but as you look up you see the heavens spiraling away to the figures of God with Christ by his side at the apex. It's pretty dramatic, and frightening! You are completely overwhelmed by the power and majesty of heaven and feel just a little bit terrified. Oh, and FYI, this is God who smiteth and drowneth and Burneth, not a benevolent old grandad distantly realated to Santa Claus.

Even knowing about it beforehand I couldn't see the flatness of the ceiling when I looked up, and I think I stood there for about five minutes - until a small child walked into my open mouth. I have problems with the Jesuits - historically, philosophically and you know there's the whole does God exist thing, but as theatre and spectacle and making the most of your money goes, you've got to give 'em credit.

Anyway it brought home to me how powerful, and how much fun perspective can be. Though I guess it does all depend on your point of view.