I am restless by nature. I hate wasting time. Some of the things I like to do to fill up little spaces of unproductive time, such as time spent waiting for the ferry, include knitting socks. Knitting, and indeed any needlework, has a soothing effect on me and, to judge by the look of other knitters, it soothes other people too.
I also like to buy used books at The Second Page in Courtenay. It is a small used-book store run by a man who grew up over the public library his mother ran. I once asked him for a particular author and he reached his hand into a stack of books and pulled a title from that author out of the stack. It was like a magic trick.
At the moment, I am really into reading Agatha Christie murder mysteries. I very much enjoy her early writing from the 1920’s. Her descriptions of the technologies they used then are fascinating. I also find the social conventions of one hundred years ago very interesting. She writes some things that woked -up people now would have fits of the vapours over. I find it interesting to see how conventions and popular beliefs change over time.
Another thing I find relaxing is to paint. A dear friend gave me a stout leather purse. It is fairly large and I kept it for a year or so before I discovered its role in my life. It is just the perfect size to contain a sketchbook or two, a lot of pens, pencils, a small box of watercolour paints and a water brush. My bag contains more goodies because I never know when the urge to use a dip pen and ink, or something, will come over me.
A water brush is a excellent and exciting paintbrush. These brushes have a hollow body that one fills with water and a synthetic tip that comes to a really excellent point. A slight pressure on the body of the brush adds more water to the bristles making it a fabulous brush for outdoor sketches.
I hadn’t painted or drawn for a long time because my life is very busy and I don’t have an hour or two to sit down and work on a painting. One day, I was noodling around on YouTube and came across Danny Gregory. He has a YouTube channel called Sketchbook Skool. Danny is a self-taught sketchbook artist who teaches drawing and painting and publishes his sketchbooks. I watched his video on a seven-day sketchbook challenge. The first day was devoted to drawing breakfast. I was having watermelon, a gift from a couple of friends who grew some lovely watermelons here on Denman. It made quite a pretty picture.
Each day of the week had a different subject to draw. This was a terrific help to me because I never knew what I wanted to paint. Having a list of subjects to draw was exciting and helpful. Danny teaches people to draw their own lives. While I spent the week drawing the subjects he proposed, I also started to draw other subjects that just caught my eye.
I drew a series of vignettes of our ferry trip to town one day. Another unscheduled drawing was of a couple of jars of lemon rinds in vinegar that I had steeping in my living room. I use the lemon-scented vinegar for cleaning and as a hair rinse. They also made a nice picture.
I started to do continuous-line drawings. I drew such a portrait of a friend who had joined us for lunch in town. It looked a lot like some of the wilder Picasso drawings. I looked up the connection between Picasso and continuous-line drawing. Picasso invented the continuous-line drawing. He was a classically-trained artist of great ability. I was able to see many of his student works when I visited Barcelona many years ago. Picasso found continuous-line drawings helped him loosen up. I too find it helps me to not overthink or be too fussy in my drawing.
I saw some examples of Neurographic Art which is a, deceptively simple, method of drawing. It was invented in 2014 by Psychologist Pavel Piskarev. One simply draws lines on a paper and smooths the intersections where the lines meet. The resulting spaces are filled in with colour. The results look magical and the practice has a magical component. While smoothing the intersections of the lines, a person can think of the changes they wish to make in life and the process is very helpful to make such changes.
I sent pictures of my drawings to friends and one friend, who is living in a conflict zone, wrote back asking how to learn it. I explained and told her about the magical possibilities of transforming fear or some such negative emotion into something better. She was very excited and feels her area of the world could use such a practice now. With the political situation in Canada and the States being what it is, maybe we could all use a little sketchbook in our lives.
