Brace yourself for a trip round my house. We’re starting with the business end – the room with the windows, the TV, the table full of keyboard, screen, and arty miscellany, the bookshelves, the windowsill being another sort of shelf, and the cupboards full of old vinyl LPs. I chose charcoal because it’s loose and I’m not likely to be able to execute anything more precise while standing, holding a sketch book in one hand and driving a piece of medium with the other.  Here we go:

Even I can’t tell immediately what this is but trust me when I say it’s a small cabinet with vinyls in the bottom, a drawer full of stuff that no longer has a raison d’anything at all, an aperture with a dvd player, and a swing top with a TV on it. It was the first sketch of the group.

Next is the windowsill (middle left) with plants, baskets of paper towel rolls, sketch pads, and an oran outang, a can of spray varnish and the obligatory fly zapper.

On the right is a small bookcase with – well – books on it. Bottom left is the printer, external hard drives and some sort of speaker woofer device.

The computer is actually that shape – a kind diamond projection out the front – but it shouldn’t need explaining! On the right, yet another cupboard arrangement with more vinyls behind the doors. More incisive commentary to come; WP was playing up earlier and not displaying the images so it wasn’t possible to annotate. Now it’s got its act together and it’s late so I’m way past any academic focus. Tomorrow.

***

25th January. The kitchen, mostly. And the discovery that neither Faber Castell or Prisma work that well on sugar paper in this context so I moved to white charcoal. I’d really not looked forward to this exercise – drawing while standing and holding a sketch book in my other hand isn’t that easy but the upside is that I can’t fiddle and poke around with what I’m doing, I just have to get it down there, no matter how unstable the materials or media. As it turned out, they weren’t that unstable at all and the looseness of the drawing was quite pleasing. It’s almost as if I could look at the imperfections and say to myself well, what do you expect for balancing on one leg in a hurricane with a feather for a pen? My ‘get it right’ attitude was off the hook and it reminds me now of the writers’ mantra – don’t get it right, get it written. Getting it right comes later, after the multiple drafts and revisions, edits and teeth-pulling.