Hermit Diary 21: A drawing

In real life, it took about fourteen minutes to do this fountain-pen drawing of objects on the top of my desk: a miniature orchid in a Wedgewood pot, a dish of seed pods, pine cones and a snail shell, jars of brushes and a feather. I hope you'll enjoy watching it take shape on the page in an abbreviated version. The final drawing is shown below and at the end of the video.

It's is a bit paradoxical: I was drawing fast, and aiming for a loose, energetic line, but because it requires focus and concentration to work that way, the process feels contemplative. Everything slows down a great deal; time barely moves, and I'm sure my breathing and heart rate slow too. For that reason it's kind of odd to view the process speeded-up 4x, but I didn't think anyone would want to sit through nearly a quarter of an hour of video, even though it would convey the contemplative aspect much better. On the other hand, I've always been fascinated by time-lapse photography and condensed footage, so there's that too.

I'll try this with some other art media in the future. Maybe I can get a slightly better angle next time that shows the whole page straight-on.

Still life with orchid, Wedgewood pot, and seed pods. Fountain pen on paper; 9" x 6", in Stillman&Birn gamma series sketchbook.

Comments

[Natalie]

Beth, I can't see the video. A message comes up saying: This video is private.

I think you have to click on the option to make it public. Are you using Vimeo or uploading toYouTube? Either way, there will be options to check in the settings.
The drawing is lovely and it would be great to watch the video.

[Natalie]

I see it now, thanks! Lovely to watch the lines gradually advancing over the paper, like a living plant. Your hand remains quite still, even with the speeded up video. The pen looks like a good one, does it use ink cartridges?
I have too many drawing pens, end up using none.

[Roderick Robinson]

Takes me into a dream world. The video would be rather dull but I'm imagining fiction-writing speeded up to this degree. In fact as you were engineering this post I was experiencing my own accelerando.

My latest novel, Rictangular Lenses, started in 2016 bogged down for at least two years at about 30,000 words. Unheard-of. Especially at my age, I can't be playing around, wasting time. Previously I'd managed to write almost two novels in a similar period. It wasn't that I couldn't add a single word, I couldn't bring myself to open up the file which contained the MS.

For reasons I cannot explain the blockage lifted mid-2019 and within two months I'd written 11,000 words. After which, the plot, from being the barest of skeletons, stretched ahead in much greater detail.

The Plague doesn't encourage writing fiction - perhaps because reality is too stark - but during the last fortnight I found myself at the end of a longish scene and engaged in the most delicate of minuets around the beginning of the next scene. I moved Lindsay down from north-east England to London, always the most fruitful of seed beds. Had her moving rather slowly towards a Caribbean restaurant in Brixton (an inner suburb I doubt you have visited) and then an avalanche, a new character, a new development for Lindsay's friend - best of all 5000 words of clarity, waiting, ready to be mined with ease.

As I watched your incredibly precise hand, the pen held almost always at the same angle, I became transfixed with the fantasy of your mind moving at the same speed. Such that present and future were hardly separate. That the drawing had, in some sense, been completed within your artist's mental ante-chamber and simply needed only to be rendered, not created. An idea further enhanced by the delicious rightness I had felt as dialogue developed puckishly and unexpectedly in Brixton. Pure fantasy and perhaps not of any great interest to you. But for me a fleeting duality which leaves me changed.

One non-fantastical detail. The drawing is created from right to left, yet you are right-handed. I'm sure in primary school interfering teachers probably tried to correct this. Saying you'd smudge what you'd done. Happily you've followed your instincts. The video, an artificial construct, nevertheless managed to suggest the happiness waiting to be uncovered in the creative act. A great idea.

[flask]

ah. so completely lovely.