On Drawing, Water and Time

Water and time are deeply connected.

Over the last year I have been making a series of large scale works that explore this connection. I watch the water and then I try to draw it. I catch it in tiny circles or lines, each one a single drop, a moment gathered, stilled and set down.

In the waves on the loch by my studio, the water in the burn nearby, the rush of it through the fish ladder, the distant sound of the sea, you can hear the uninterrupted humming of life going on ceaselessly. Time as a sound, as a dense substance which buoys us along as we swim hard, trying, uselessly, to resist its flow.

A drawing emerges within time, ongoingness made visible. How much time passes can come as a surprise. It’s always my body that starts to get restless. I stop not because I am bored but because my body needs to stop – eat, pee, stretch.

I think I’m drawing water, but it turns out I’m drawing time. Each drawing becomes a receptacle of time that I fill up drop by drop, turning time into texture so as to better see it. Sedimented here in these layers of little marks I see the drawing’s own duration gathered up and stilled, at least for as long as the drawing itself exists.

Each drawing is a net for catching time.

 Whatever else is going on, however anxious I might be feeling, there is something here that steadies me each time. It has something to do with rhythm, with repetition, with handling materials and listening as they speak back to me and the quietness that unfolds itself there.

It has something to do with silence. Drawing is a way to find silence, a rich and necessary solitude. Giving the busy left-brain part of my mind a simple, rhythmic task to focus on serves to quiet the mental chatter that otherwise goes on endlessly Yada yada yada. This seems to allow another, more holistic, right-brain way of understanding to make itself heard.

It’s a rebalancing. I know if I don’t do it for a while, something feels wrong, off-kilter.

My hope is that the drawings I make are an invitation to share in that moment of silence, a moment of calm in these bewildering times.