Category: creativity

In the pub with Ardizzone

On By Michael Richards (certainline)In art, artistic development, coloured pencil, creativity, dip pen, drawing, Edward Ardizzone, illustration, ink, inspiration, nostalgia18 Comments
(In the Pub 2025 pen and ink and coloured pencils A4)

There is one illustrator who, I would argue, towers over all of us: Edward Ardizzone (1900-1979). His illustrations are loose and lively yet full of character and humanity, his artistry always secondary to his affection for the people he pictures, whether it was young boys off to seek adventure, plump washerwomen with forearms like ham hocks, witches cleaving the darkness of midnight on their broomsticks, or red-nosed travelling salesmen propping up the bar at the Crown and Anchor.

People in pubs was something of a theme with Ardizzone – some of his most endearing drawings show goings-on in the  public houses of the 1940s and 1950s: dark, smoke-filled dives populated with the jovial and the rotund, the lost and forgotten, the rowdy and loquacious. My own drawing (above) pays tribute to a situation that could have come from an Ardizzone illustration (but his would have been much more accomplished!).

When I was a young man in my 20s, back in the early 1970s, I wrote to Ardizzone and asked him for advice, as I mentioned here some time ago. In his letter, the original of which you can see on this earlier post, he wrote:

An illustrator cannot, by the nature of his job, draw from life. He has to draw from his imagination informed by knowledge. To acquire knowledge, attend life classes, then go into the countryside to draw landscape and in particular trees…Never be frightened to gain knowledge by copying works by masters of the past. It is how they gained their knowledge.

After some further tips, he concluded, “This sounds like a formidable list, but have courage.” Then, somewhat mischievously in a PS, he added: “I could not draw with the pen you use [a Rotring Rapidograph]. I use an old fashioned steel nib (a Waverley) in an old fashioned pen holder, the nib being dipped into a bottle of old fashioned Indian ink.” I eventually took Ardizzone’s advice to heart: the above drawing was largely executed with a Tachikawa nib in a very comfortable Japanese pen holder.

The three drinkers in my picture bring back memories of my dear old Dad. Returning to Manchester for the weekend from studying in London during the 1970s, I would arrange to meet my Father at his tailoring business. When the shop closed, he, his assistant Mr Rose, his cloth cutter Mr Vincent, and I would make our way to one of the smoky, dingy city pubs that they frequented. This was their routine every evening: they would close the shop, buy three copies of the Manchester evening newspaper, go to the pub and order three rounds of drinks, while reading interesting tidbits from their newspapers to each other (even though they all had the same one). Their nightly routine made few allowances for my presence. Sometimes Mr Vincent would ask me about drawing or Mr Rose would talk about his years in London, but usually they were hidden from view behind their newspapers and I was left to nurse my half pint and observe the other customers.

So the three men in a dark city pub in my drawing conjure up the ghosts of Friday evenings past. Whenever I returned ‘home’ from wherever I was living at the time, it was my Father’s great pleasure to drop into a pub for ‘a quick pint’. That’s where we had our most meaningful conversations, there among the the jovial and the rotund, the lost and forgotten, the rowdy and loquacious, just like in Edward Ardizzone’s drawings, or the three figures in my own version above.

Creativity and boredom

On By Michael Richards (certainline)In art, collage, creativity, inspiration, music, still life12 Comments
Tulips (2024/ collage of painted paper on board/ 254 x 203mm)

In her book about Joni Mitchell, Travelling, Ann Powers asks James Taylor what made his former lover such an exceptional writer:

“I do have a theory about her growing up in Saskatchewan and having a lot of open and by our standards empty time, and enough quiet to have a rich internal life…I remember growing up in North Carolina and I think it’s very connected to the way Joni must have grown up as a kid – there was a lot of time, a fair amount of boredom and sort of this internal imaginative life…That must have been the case with Bob Dylan in Hibbing, Minnesota, or Neil Young in North Ontario, or any number of people who were somehow allowed enough time to form their own thought patterns.”

Powers continues: “The child left to her own devices can begin to imagine getting somewhere, and that is the value, for the adult she becomes, of keeping her in mind.”

This rings true to me. My own childhood included a good deal of ‘open’ time and a hefty pinch of boredom. My brother is 11 years older than I, and when he was a teenager the last thing he wanted to do was hang around with his infant brother. What’s more, my Mother had five sisters and two brothers, all living some distance away, and most Sundays we drove to visit one or more of them. These were the days before children were encouraged to express themselves – indeed, we were taught to be seen but not heard. Luckily, my Father indulged me with an endless supply of order books from his tailoring business so I could sit and draw to my heart’s content while the adults drank tea and ate cake.

In the corners of those dark-furnished rooms I chalked up many of my 10,000 hours of drawing practice*. In the evenings, too, between homework and bedtime, there were more hours to be filled before television stepped in to steal our spare time. Pretty soon, I became proficient at drawing in a sort of comic book style (my influences were American Mad and Archie comics and British Commando war stories) while the subject matter sprung from my own imagination. I never copied anything other than a general stylistic language. Furthermore, it was very much ‘art for art’s sake’ so far as I was concerned: once the order books were filled neither I nor my parents had any wish to keep them or re-read them and they were thrown away as soon as my Father brought home a fresh one. Doing it was the thing, and the only thing that mattered.

Of course, you don’t have to be an only child. James Taylor fails to mention that he had at least two brothers and a sister; the three Bronte sisters were prolific in their short lives before the damp in Howarth parsonage carried them off; and the Bach boys must have taken in it turns to experiment on the harpsichord while Dad finished off a Passion in another room. It is the opportunity for solitary contemplation that matters and if you are an only child – in fact or in effect, as I was – those opportunities are more readily available.

It feels like a privilege in retrospect, that gift of time, that abundance of opportunity. Much is made of gratitude, quite rightly, in our mindful times, and if it sounds perverse to be grateful for boredom sixty years ago, I’m sure Joni Mitchell would agree with me.

* This refers to Malcolm Gladwell’s since debunked theory that 10,000 hours of ‘deliberate practice’ are required to reach the highest level of proficiency in anything, based on the Beatles’ numerous daily sets during their Hamburg residencies before they hit the big time and Bill Gates’ noodling around on early computers as a teenager. Michelle Monet has calculated that this adds up to 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, 44 weeks a year for over 5 years, so we can be happy that this theory no longer holds true – not even my Mother had that many siblings to make such a feat possible.

What we can learn from Paul and Nick

On By Michael Richards (certainline)In art, coloured pencil, creativity, ink, inspiration13 Comments
Spring Bulbs (A4 ink and coloured pencils 2024)

“A lot of this writing, it’s just what comes out. When something bubbles up and it either catches my eye or it amuses me or, if I’m really lucky, it moves me – I keep those things. I don’t have to question them any further. There’s already something about them that means they’re worth keeping. I don’t really analyse every speck of a song: if it feels right, I leave it because it feels right.” Paul Simon

It can be interesting to hear what creative people in other fields say about their work. This quote from Paul Simon touched me. I liked the idea that something – a phrase, a subject perhaps – catches your mind’s eye and becomes authorised, so to speak, for later use. It needs no further processing because you’ve already decided that you want to use it, that it’s fit for purpose.

“Even though [my] notebooks are full of meaningless words, there are always little bits in there that in time begin to rise off the page. It’s like those classic spy movies where someone is trying to break a code. They’re staring at random numbers or letters that seem to mean nothing and then suddenly something appears as if by magic out of the mess. With songwriting…what happens is that [ideas] suddenly present themselves, rise from the page and begin to hold hands. Not all at once necessarily, but quite rapidly, and then you start to get creative momentum, a kind of collecting together of information that moves forward towards the basic framing of a song, That’s the thrilling part. It’s really the best part.” Nick Cave

In Faith, Hope and Carnage, Nick Cave talks eloquently to Sean O’Hagan about his religious faith, the tragic deaths of two of his sons, life on the road in a rock band, and – in this excerpt – the creative process. His description of ideas rising from the page and beginning to hold hands will be something that we all can recognise whatever form our creativity might take: that moment during the act of creating when suddenly things are going well – the words flow, the notes gel, the brushstrokes form into an image.

What’s intriguing about hearing or reading the thoughts of artists from other disciplines is how their stories can inform our own practice even if the medium is very different. Last year, my partner and I visited the Dingle Lit festival where she, an abstract painter, found herself inspired and moved by hearing authors such as Max Porter and John Banville – both novelists – speak about their work. Issues they encountered with inspiration mirrored her own. It’s less the type of work that matters in this cross-fertilisation than the map that informs the journey.

Social media is awash with snippets of wisdom that are intended to readjust your thinking, your outlook, even your life. “People are afraid of those who know themselves”, for example, or “Life doesn’t give you the people you want but the people you need.” If you find these phrases helpful – fine. However, nothing, I’d suggest, beats a flow of ideas rather than a phrase plucked out of the ether. So hearing Paul Simon talking at length about his songwriting process and the inspiration behind those familiar hits is more rewarding for having context. Equally, I would urge you to seek out a copy of Nick Cave’s book, simply to hear an eloquent man talking about the defining issues in his life and art, and to witness his ideas developing as he explores.

We all struggle with similar issues. Take the blank page, for example. There are any number of exercises you can do to overcome the fear of starting something. Art teachers, life coaches, and psychologists will walk you through their preferred steps to fill that white sheet with notes, words, marks. Yet how much more encouraging it is to hear Nick Cave struggling with his notebook full of nonsense or Paul Simon filing away things that move him or make him laugh for later use like a mood board in his head.

Let me leave you with a quote from another book that, like the Nick Cave, was given to me as a gift. Towards the end of “Every Good Boy Does Fine: A Love Story in Music Lessons” by pianist Jeremy Denk, he writes about a particularly annoying period of practice:

“Occasionally, I felt I would rather be crucified while listening to Donald Trump read Dante aloud than practice the piano another minute. But each day, I found more in the music, or at least not less: a stubborn value that wouldn’t vanish.”

Isn’t that what we seek in whatever artform we practice: the stubborn value that won’t vanish? I’d say so, whatever form it might take.

The Bee

On By Michael Richards (certainline)In art, artistic development, creativity, drawing, inspiration, life drawing33 Comments
Diary of a Narcissus (2022 pastel and charcoal A3)

Bees, moving from flower to flower collecting pollen to make into honey, helping the flowers to reproduce. Without bees pollinating the blooms they visit, many plants would die out, numerous crops would fail, and the animals, birds and humans that depend upon them would starve and die. The bee is probably unaware of its essential role in the grand scheme of things: it’s just doing a job in its own corner of the universe. Similarly, the picture you paint, the words you write, the music you compose or play is part of the fabric of the culture. If we surrender to the creative impulse, our singular piece of the puzzle takes its proper shape and adds to the whole.

This is adapted from a chapter called Intention in Rick Rubin’s acclaimed book on creativity, The Creative Act: A Way of Being. Rubin is that big beardy guy who popularised hip hop through co-founding Def Jam Records many moons ago and rejuvenated the career of Johnny Cash, encouraging him to try new material in the autumn of his years. It’s fair to say that he probably knows more than many about the creative spark.

The truth of his observation was brought home to me one evening during my life drawing class. About eight of us meet to draw a nude model every week. One or two use the long pose to paint a portrait in oils; another collages pieces of paper to produce a varied ground on which to draw; one chap with a more limited attention span produces two or three drawings during that long pose – sometimes they verge on cartoons with widely distorted features. All of these add to the greater whole: to be without one – as sometimes happens when someone is sick or on holiday – lessens the impact of the evening. When the model tours the room, taking photographs on his/her phone of the finished pieces, he/she sees a range of interpretations of the human body. In Rick Rubin’s words, “each singular piece of the puzzle…adds to the whole”.

This seems like a useful place to stop. I first posted here in March 2015. A great deal has happened over those years – both personally and in the wider world – and the place of blogs seems to have diminished somewhat. I have looked at numerous topics to do with drawing and painting, reported on courses I’ve attended, shared some thoughts about life models, loosening up, and learning from other artists. In recent years, though, I find I have less to say, and the ever longer gaps between posts admonish me with their silence.

Two subjects continue to nag away though. The first is the role of social media in creativity: I stopped trying to post here on a weekly basis when I realised the images I was posting were suffering in terms of quality. The same feeling hit me recently about Instagram, where I’ve been a much more regular contributor. Social media for me was a place where I could post pictures and connect with sympathetic people whose work I admired. Eventually, though, it became a hamster wheel where the need for ‘likes’ overtakes the value of the work itself. Every now and then you have to step down and breathe, or play, or experiment, or create without worrying about whether it’ll get over 100 likes or not.

The second subject is inspiration. I remain intrigued by the whole question of inspiration, its fickle nature, and its source. I’m sometimes baffled by some of the artists I follow on Instagram who seem content to keep recycling a single idea: I know galleries like this – if they can sell one flower painting they feel they can sell another, and don’t want their artists to start submitting something else – but what’s in it for the artist beyond sales? Is it rewarding or satisfying? Are they inspired to produce only one kind of painting, or was that their original inspiration that they feel safe in endlessly reproducing?

Where does inspiration come from anyway? It’s a mysterious thing, isn’t it? A couple of years ago I was rather ill with anaemia and lacked both the energy and the inspiration to do much of any quality. Responding to online ‘challenges’ ( see previous post) or drawing cards for the birthdays of family and friends kept me going, but my inspiration was as low as my red blood cells for some months. If inspiration comes from God – as the late Madeleine L’Engle claims in her book, Walking on Water – why did He withdraw it when I needed it the most? If it comes from a common source of inspiration that feeds off the work of artists past and present, why does it dry up – sometimes for ever? Perhaps these are questions that can never be answered.

Thank you to all of you who have followed this blog, sometimes for years, even when posts were thin on the ground. I followed the ‘likes’ of a post I produced a few years ago and was sad to see how many have stopped posting. One or two worried me in their silence – the lady who suffered from depression and ADHD who suddenly stopped, the woman who started drawing when her beloved husband died suddenly whose site somehow disappeared from my Reader. I hope they’ve simply found other outlets for their creativity.

I’m not saying that I won’t post ever again, just that this feels like a good time and place to pause. Thank you again for your time, engagement, and encouragement. It meant – and means – a great deal to me.

The fool, the tree, and the stars

On By Michael Richards (certainline)In art, cartoons, creativity, dip pen, folklore, illustration, ink, inspiration12 Comments

The Fool on the Hill (30cm x 15cm ink and coloured pencil 2022)

In my previous post I mentioned that last year, I’d tried to overcome a creative block by taking part in online challenges, particularly one, created by a group of illustrators, on folklore and folk customs. For those of you not on Instagram, I thought I’d share a few of the prompts and my responses.

Folklore is not an area I know a great deal about, so the research alone would be distracting before I’d even put pencil to paper. The first prompt was Fool, which was nicely open-ended for a starting point. It’s also great fun to draw medieval fools with their caps and bells and exaggerated movements. I chose The Fool on the Hill (above) just for the chance to draw an impossible hill, not to illustrate the Beatles song (in which, you’ll remember, the Fool stands ‘perfectly still’ and doesn’t prance around like a hare on a griddle).

The Tale of the Disappointing Tree (A4 ink and coloured pencil 2022)

The next prompt was Tree, which is where the research – and the strangeness – began.

James Frazer’s The Golden Bough describes a folk tradition in Bulgaria. On Christmas Eve, a woodsman would threaten a low-yielding fruit tree with an axe while a second man intercedes on the tree’s behalf. Three times the tree is threatened with destruction, three times its advocate pleads for mercy. The threat of extinction is enough to frighten the tree into producing fruit abundantly the following year.

Stars (A4 ink and coloured pencil 2022)

Later in the week we were given the prompt, Stars.

There are numerous approaches to this: Orion being killed by a giant scorpion and the gods arranging their constellations so that they never appear together in the night sky; the belief that shooting stars were the souls of new-born babies being despatched to Earth; or the rule that you should never point at stars because they represent gods who don’t like mortals pointing at them.

In the end I went for this charming medieval folk belief. Trying to count stars is again considered bad luck, but if you’re looking for a life partner you may count up to seven of them for seven nights, then on the eighth day the first person with whom you shake hands will become your husband or wife. So here’s my pale poet, eagerly counting up to seven while his troubadour strums upon a lute. He looks eager enough, doesn’t he? I do hope he finds someone.

There were further prompts for Costume, Victory, Tricks and Potions, all of which sent me off to reference books and internet searches. It was an inspiring week of learning, drawing, posting and admiring the efforts of others involved in the challenge. It also demonstrated that as much as I enjoy painting still life arrangements or churches or flowers, I’m at ease with this sort of pen and ink illustration and can concentrate on the subject without too much worrying about technique. If I’d been compelled to use acrylics or pastels without the comfort of the inked line I’d probably still be working on them. In that sense the challenge helped me return to creativity without too many hurdles to jump which, at that time, was more than welcome.

Most of all, looking at different subjects for six days (I missed Potions) and having to produce a drawing each day was a useful exercise to restore drawing muscles I’d neglected over the previous months. As I mentioned in my previous post, regardless of your particular area of creativity, these challenges can be both useful and inspiring. At the very least, you’ll discover something about trees and stars.

Art in wartime

On By Michael Richards (certainline)In art, conflict, creativity, drawing, grief, illustration, inspiration, painting, world affairs10 Comments
Orchid (detail) (2022 acrylic and graphite 30cms x 20cms)

A writer who, as a child, didn’t like vegetables much, remembered her mother saying, “Eat up your greens! Think of all the starving children in Africa.” “How does my eating sprouts help the children in Africa?” asked the young writer-to-be.

I was reminded of this as I read Jay Rayner’s restaurant review in the (London) Observer newspaper recently: “On the morning my train to Liverpool pulled out of London Euston, the media was full of images of other trains: crowded ones, filled with terrified people, fleeing for their lives, an invading Russian army at their backs. I, meanwhile, was going to lunch.” Rayner followed this with four paragraphs of justification for writing about brown crab rarebit while the suffering continued in Ukraine. He quoted counsellor and agony aunt Philippa Perry’s advice, tweeted in response to a question on this theme, “Stay in the present and not the hypothetical mythical future. Deal with what is, not what might be. Remember to enjoy yourself as much as possible. It doesn’t help anyone if you don’t enjoy yourself.”

Recently, artists on Instagram have also been questioning the point of making art during wartime. Why draw these apples on an antique plate while the bombs fall on Kyiv? Is painting frivolous, irrelevant, even disrespectful when families are huddled in basements, fearful of their lives?

The artist and teacher Nicholas Wilton explained his reasons for continuing to create during these troubled times in a recent blog post: “Making our art is all about making connections — it moves us towards a connection to ourselves and others. Non-artists are also connected to our cherished vision when they experience…our art. This shared experience of what we make helps create a more connected and, as a result, a safer, kinder world. Making art is a practice of showing the world what truly matters. And it makes a difference.”

One of the many supportive comments on Wilton’s blog post, from a woman who had trained as a physician before switching to painting, underlined this point: “embodying what we are for is more powerful than opposing what we are against….Art heals. Living from that place, there is no inclination towards violence, harm, neglect, disrespect. Only love and celebration…generosity and gratitude, and so much more.” A recent clip on Twitter showed a young woman in her Ukranian apartment, the windows blown out, playing Bach on her piano before she left the room for ever, becoming a refugee from the place she called home. It was important for her to play that final piece amongst the devastation, on the brink of her unknown future, dressed in a warm coat in the ruins of her former life.

Painting a picture, writing a poem, playing the piano – all help us make sense of the world we live in and perhaps go some way towards helping to create a better world, one where “love and celebration, generosity and gratitude” are more in evidence. If we don’t do these things, it won’t help the people under fire in Ukraine; doing them, however, might just be a small step forward into the light.

Collage and sausages

On By Michael Richards (certainline)In abstract, art, artistic development, collage, creativity, inspiration30 Comments
In the Studio (A4 ink 2021)

How easy, do you think, would it be for me to loosen up my art practice when I’m the sort of person who arrives at airports two hours ahead of my flight, cooks sausages in a neat row, and arranges his CDs by genre, artist/composer, and then date of release (with compilations, of course, at the end)?

If the sight of a wayward sausage in a frying pan is going to cause me mild anxiety, how am I going to be at ease with wobbly lines and the threat of the non-figurative? Yet the little drawing above, drawn in a matter of minutes with a stick dipped in ink, is one of my most popular images on Instagram.

Well, one way is to allow someone to take you by the hand and lead you into the wild woods. For me, that person was abstract painter Jenny Nelson, and specifically a wonderful free tutorial she has compiled on greyscale collage. Nelson is a superb artist and has the skills to teach some of the tricks of her trade. Her own work is bold and expressive as you can see if you spend a few minutes wandering around her website.

In the tutorial she demonstrates a simple exercise that enables the most uptight person to loosen up. I won’t describe it in any detail because you should really take a look at it yourself. I’d even go so far as to say that even if you’re not a visual artist, but a musician or a writer, the cleansing nature of this 50 minute exercise would help you too.

I produced about four collages after the tutorial, which again received a warm reception on Instagram. One of the four, I think, works well as a composition in its own right, not just an exercise in loosening up:

Composition (collaged painted papers 135mm x 220mm 2021)

I’ve gone back to producing drawings using sticks and discarded feathers as drawing tools, but have also continued to work with collage using painted paper as my basic materials. It’s a practice which I’ll probably continue to develop alongside my other work, simply because it shakes around one’s preconceptions in a rather satisfying way, like lottery tickets in a hat.

That doesn’t mean I’ll stop lining up sausages in a frying pan any time soon. One of my closest and most enduring friendships is with someone who does exactly the same thing, so both of us cannot be wrong.

Expecting to fly

On By Michael Richards (certainline)In art, artistic development, collage, creativity, inspiration, mixed media, still life16 Comments
Sunflowers (2021 mixed media and collage 30 cms x 20 cms)

Let’s listen to two artists who coincidentally produce work for The New Yorker. First, Bruce McCall:

“Life in general has treated me better than I deserved. As a kid from nowhere, with no education, no guidance, no money, no formal training, I should have had no dreams, let alone an expectation to fulfil them. But to my continued astonishment, I’ve maintained a nearly four-decades-long romance with The New Yorker and accomplished the only dream I knew I had: to be an artist…Growing up poor and unworldly doesn’t sentence you to a mediocre, artless life (if it did, we wouldn’t have the Beatles) – but it certainly doesn’t help. I don’t think being coddled by familial love and money would have necessarily made me a ‘better’ artist, but it might have helped me see that I was one a few decades earlier. If you ignore the value of your calling out of fear…your greatest fears will likely come true: you will abandon your true calling.” (from How Did I Get Here: A Memoir, Blue Rider Press 2020)

And now, cartoonist Harry Bliss:

“My parents never steered me in any direction in terms of a career path. I never thought about money when it came to choose the path. At 13 I knew I wanted to be an artist and that was that. I never worried about whether I could earn a living, I only knew that if I worked at it it would happen and in the meantime I was perfectly fine working in restaurants to pay the rent. There were a few times though, when my well-intentioned mother…thought it would be a good idea for me to do caricature portraits on the boardwalk in Atlantic City, $10 per portrait. ‘At the end of the day you could be making a lot of money’ she advised. I didn’t take her advice.” (extracted from a post on Instagram @blisscartoons July 2021 – do seek this out: the post takes a sudden turn at this point into a related story that is both astonishing and deeply moving)

These quotes seem to occupy two somewhat opposing viewpoints, even though both McCall and Bliss were convinced from an early age that they would be artists. The former took a series of jobs in advertising and the media which provided a good living for him and his family, until one day after a particularly unrewarding stint as a writer on Saturday Night Live he decided to take the plunge into being a full-time artist. Bliss, on the other hand, was going to be an artist whatever, working menial jobs until he could make it work financially.

I can sympathise with McCall. Like him, I wanted the trappings of material success: a nice place to live, books, foreign travel, bottles of wine, pictures on the wall – and although my chosen career of book publishing was never going to make me rich, I’ve been comfortable enough all these years. Unlike Bliss, I was never going to be happy in a bedsit in the Manchester suburb where I grew up, stacking supermarket shelves, drawing and painting at night and over the weekends until my genius was recognised.

More than poverty though, I was fearful of having this artistic calling devalued. I used to work, at the beginning of my career in a London bookshop, with an inspiring man whose first love was jazz. He was a bass player who played gigs and recorded a couple of albums with a quartet, but he never wanted it to be his job. Some years later, in the back of a taxicab in San Francisco, the driver told me that he too was a jazz bassist but he loved the instrument so much he wasn’t, as he put it, “going to be told by some asshole pianist what to play” so instead he took up the saxophone and that’s the instrument he played in bands. Finally, a few years ago I did a short course in oil painting where I met a woman whose day job was an illustrator. “My dream job,” I told her. “Not if all you do is draw people playing tennis and football for sportswear companies’ annual reports,” she replied. Not Maurice Sendak then.

I was never certain that I would be good enough for art to make me a living, even a modest one. As an illustrator you need a Gruffalo or a Very Hungry Caterpillar; as a fine artist you need to catch the eye of one of those high profile gallerists who’ll sell your shark in formaldehyde or your vacuum cleaner in a vitrine to hedge fund managers. I can’t see my acrylics of quinces hanging in the Marlborough, can you?

Of course, you can make a decent living following your artistic calling without having to pickle sea creatures. My partner gave up a career in nursing to become a textile designer and made a good living from it. Turning then to fine art and printmaking, she regularly sells her inspiring and beautiful work via her website and galleries. It makes me think of baby birds discovering why they have wings: they stand on the edge of their nests and launch themselves into the void, expecting to fly. How do they know their untried wings will carry them aloft and not send them crashing to the ground?

I can’t complain though. Now I have the time and opportunity not only to create, but to play, to experiment, as with the drawing of sunflowers above. This is a new departure for me: using collage and monoprinting to create imprecise areas of tone – no pencil underdrawing – using a piece of twig rather than a nib or a stylus to create living, breathing lines.

Learning to fly!

PS This painting and many others are available to buy on my website at michaelrichardsart.com.

I can draw a cat

On By Michael Richards (certainline)In art, artistic development, creativity, drawing, illustration, ink, painting, perfectionism29 Comments
Mickey (A5 Prismacolor indigo blue pencil 2020)

Axel Scheffler, perhaps best known as the illustrator of the Gruffalo, once said in a radio interview that if you can draw, people think you can draw anything. There are, he continued, so many things he wouldn’t even attempt.

As a young man this used to bother me enormously. Why can’t I draw a passable bicycle? If I can draw a dog why do I struggle to draw a horse? These days I simply avoid drawing bicycles or horses, but if my life depended on drawing a bicycle for some odd reason then I’d draw it like Quentin Blake.

I’ve also regretted never learning to play the guitar – or the acoustic bass. Why didn’t you then? you might ask. The answer, I’m afraid, is that I never wanted to be a mediocre musician and I was daunted by the amount of practice required to become proficient.

This is all rather sad, isn’t it? Worrying about what one can’t do instead of celebrating what one can. Not doing something that would have probably given me enormous pleasure and provided great comfort down the years simply because I would never be John Renbourn or Stefan Grossman.

Bonny Mayer: Glasses

My good friend, Bonny Mayer, recently decided that she’d like to draw and enrolled in a class during an extended stay in Thailand. After a couple of hours the teacher returned her money and advised her to try something else. Most of us, hearing that evaluation of our skills, might never pick up a pencil again. Not Bonny. On her return to the US she enrolled in another course and frequently posts her wonderfully vivid, lively drawings on Facebook (see above).

Let’s celebrate our own potential then, draw wonky horses and raise one of Bonny’s characterful glasses to the art of not giving up. We have one life and it’s frustratingly short, so not filling it with as much as we can would seem to be something of a shame. Wouldn’t you agree?

Entre chien et loup

On By Michael Richards (certainline)In art, artistic development, creativity, drawing, inspiration, Rosemary Vanns36 Comments
Summer Rain (A5 sketchbook page, ink and watercolour, 2020)

Entre chien et loup – between dog and wolf – is simply a term for twilight or the golden hour in photography, but what an evocative phrase.

I feel it could apply to any transitional stage when things are lacking in clarity, don’t you agree? That point on the path from agnosticism to faith, perhaps, when you want to believe but still entertain doubts. Or playing a musical instrument when you can’t quite get through a piece from beginning to end without pausing to re-arrange your fingers on the keys. Or, as this is an art blog, a point between one stage of your development and another when you can’t quite throw off the old or fully embrace the new.

For some years now I’ve tried to loosen up my drawing and painting style. I’ve enrolled on courses at places like Seawhite Studios, where I’ve been taken firmly by the hand and pulled outside my comfort zone; attended life drawing classes, where the teacher would tell me – 20 minutes before the end of class – to rub out my dreary charcoal drawing and start again, producing something rushed, yes, but also free-spirited and dynamic.

In the end though, the decision to take the next step has to be one’s own. Like a baby bird on the edge of its nest, you have to make that leap and expect to fly. With me it works intermittently: a year ago I sat in the autumn sunshine in the gardens of Versailles and drew crows pecking around for crumbs. As crows don’t stay in one place for long I had to draw quickly and the resulting sketch was lively and bold by my standards. A few hours later I did a drawing of a rotting pear (which moves less often than a feeding crow) and fell back into my old ways.

Versailles crows (A5 sketchbook page, pencil, 2019)

But once you’ve made that leap the results are wonderful to behold. A few weeks ago I watched painter and printmaker, Rosemary Vanns, drawing artichokes. Barely looking at the paper, her hand moved with confidence producing firm lines that suggested rather than reproduced the vegetable in front of her. Of course this is practice, but it’s also confidence, knowing you can do it before you start. It’s recognising – intuitively perhaps – the path you want to take and boldly moving one foot in front of the other.

Rosemary Vanns’ charcoal drawings of artichokes on her studio wall,
September 2020

That is the secret you need to know to take that important next step on whatever journey you’re engaged upon. That belief that you can do it, that you can keep your gaze fixed on the artichoke and allow your fingers to move and they’ll produce something that suggests what you see before you. Believe, just believe.

So from where you’re standing, is it a dog or a wolf?