New shapes
A wander through thoughts on style, creative processes and practises. This links to ecological balance in more ways than I realised. This is touched upon in the writing and I hope to revisit it in more detail in the future.
I've been trying to draw shapes that do not look like my own.
Knowing there must be infinite ways to drag a pencil over paper, the fact that I can’t seem to draw something I don't recognise as mine is catching in my head. What makes clusters of lines, curves and turns so distinctly the creation of one or another person?
Being honest, I think I sometimes dislike a creation because it looks, to me, so clearly that it was myself who made it. Maybe this is an overfamiliarity with the angles I lean towards, the things I instinctively focus on or find comfort in. So, perhaps I just need to refresh my subject matter?
Flip through a magazine or a paper, one that someone leaves in a coffee shop or on the metro, a park bench or paper bin. Open any page and draw what you see. Still, I know that the shapes I would make, the places I would start and focus and finish, would not be the same as the next person. I also know that these differences would not be random.
I suppose this speaks to style and there’s probably something natural about being unsurprised by what your own mind makes; to grow frustratingly familiar with your style and sometimes disconnected from creation. I’m trying to find new shapes, to find new ways of understanding what I can and can’t control about things that I make. I realise that style is, when defined in the twinkling way I’m thinking of it now, beautiful.
There is style in the way we sidestep puddles, or walk through them, in the lines we’d draw with bike wheels on an empty road, how we breathe life into clothes once worn by others and how we do and don’t dance. Style is a muddle of experiences and influences, preferences and passions that we cannot always categorise. In a world where ‘style’ is often understood as how closely we adhere to unsustainably quick moving trends, this reframing has a deep purpose.
We are faced with a bundle of pressure to be quite uncreative. Art is not valued like it needs to be and creativity is often portrayed as a hobby or a quality only of the talented few whose lives are dedicated to it.
I’ll keep trying to draw shapes that don’t look like my own, because it’s helping me to play with time. Hover a pencil over paper thinking ‘do what doesn’t come to mind’, pull the pencil along thinking ‘go in the other direction, twist, turn and extend away from your first instinct’. It’s a way to find and to feel what your stylistic inclinations actually are by seeking to push against and beyond them. You don’t need a licence to make art. I wish I had become comfortable with that sooner. The benefits of creativity and the right to indulge in experimentations with ‘style’ aren’t reserved for career artists.
I’m not a psychologist, nor a sociologist or anything like an expert in art, but I feel sure that creative thinking is under nurtured in today’s world. Living on a planet under pressure, the practical and personal benefits of ‘making things’ and spending time differently aren’t yet aptly appreciated. I hope to return to write more clearly around this. For now, I know that I have found real calm in this little mission to find new shapes.
I know that in 2 minutes I could see twenty different lives by just unlocking my phone. I could see a thousand versions of life… all of those styles. In many I will see myself, I will see things I didn’t know I liked or hoped for, things I did not know would move me. At some point, though, the phone runs out of charge. Looking beyond screens, I hope to go about the world in a way that a little can be made into a lot of warmth and joy that lasts.
By Lucy.
To finish, here is a large framed drawing that sits in the entrance of Murray Edwards College Cambridge and a vase once displayed in the window of an artists studio in Edinburgh. They share a sense of freedom and lightness in the way I imagine they were made - that feels fitting for this article.
The first reads: You inspire me with Your determination And I Love You
The second reads: Cherries Life
