Showing posts with label old sketches. Show all posts
Showing posts with label old sketches. Show all posts

19.5.17

Nearly thirty years ago


I've managed to keep nearly every sketch book and piece of artwork I've created since I was twelve. This makes for a lot of paper, the majority of it pretty awful and very much in the learning curve category. I was never really very good at drawing, I simply had a fertile imagination, a doodly way of sketching and an immense drive to become 'an artist'. Whatever that meant.  Anyway, today I found this sheet of sketches while rummaging through a pile. I was torn between nostalgia and slight embarrassment.  It almost feels as if another person drew it. Which in a way, they did.


The sheet is dated September 18th, 1988, so that would be just at the very start of my A level art course. I was twenty and between the ages of sixteen and twenty, I had spent most of my time being (unknowingly) pretty depressed and screwed up in a  damp bedsit.  By the time I pencilled these sketches, I had pulled myself together and was living in a shared farmhouse in the countryside, near Oxford. It was beautiful and maybe that's why I was unconsciously themes here of metamorphosis, as it felt as if my life had started again. 

 

Despite my disconnect from them, now that I am almost fifty, I was amused to see that I have always liked tall skinny houses that are rather unapproachable.
 
 



My anti-war sympathies were obviously still with me, though it would have been more optimistic to make the Spitfire turn into a butterfly, rather than vice versa.


At first I thought that the woman and her children were pointing at the plane, but then I noticed the clouds...


 I used to draw a lot of little fisher people, this was one of the first.


However, despite distance of the years, I actually found a little sketch which is almost where I am going with my work now, nearly thirty years later. The idea needs tweaking, but there's something there...it's almost as if my younger self sent a little gift to me, through the decades.