Two Day Life Drawing at Redbrick Mill
I am a connoisseur of time, a sommelier of the clock, I roll seconds around my tongue and feel their fine difference, I hold great chunks of time in my hands and marvel at their heft, I caress time and smell its difference. A life room without a clock is like a ship without a rudder, adrift and pointless, time is our great leveller. Some revel and roll in the endless ticking of the clock whilst others fret and strain as each second is prised from their iron grip. For some the clock is a booming foghorn, for others a sinister whisper, we dance and parade before it forever enslaved to its relentless march and the class goes on.
Three hours is a luxury, a whole day an indulgence, two days is a plea for clemency, a flight from sanity, a walk in the woods, a conclave of cardinals, two days is just ridiculous when life demands so much. How can you possibly justify a whole two days, twelve hours in two parcels of six to sit and stare, stand and gape, crouch and gawk to look and savour the delicacy of time well spent, to feel the richness of seconds slipping through parted fingers, a whole weekend of pure indulgence and brain food, why not?
And so we embarked on our two day odyssey, a cruise down a syrupy river of languorous pleasure, why rush when we had an eternity to sit and think. I spent over an hour faffing and planning to then discard it with the petulance of a pampered prince, it felt lovely to think it really didn’t matter.
One more day made all the difference, look at the work and compare day one to day two, Gerry, a novice on these expeditions scaled higher than he ever dreamt he would, the qualitative transformation from one to two was astonishing, a work that limped for the first few laps suddenly sprinted to a glorious finish. Tony always a front runner in any race set new records with a large drawing in which he developed his love of joints and sinuous edges, the leg thrusting forward is a tour de force of careful and confident observation. Chris M spent the first day creating a beautiful facsimile of Charles Ginner’s wonderful maudlin landlady, a lovely attenuated melancholic figure with sad knees. I wanted to snatch it off him at this point and shout ‘no more, just forget about it Chris, it’s mine now’ such was its loveliness. Finally the other Chris spent the day with us and employed a Cubist strategy to create a Surrealist’s fantasy. Using multiple viewpoints Chris then developed the figure into an amalgam of Max Ernst, Yves Tanguy, Picasso and David Hockney 'a la' splayed chair, a fascinating piece and as they said in Fawlty Towers, ‘there’s a whole conference in it’.
Thanks for coming along all those who did, there’s a richness in the two day sessions that you can see in the work, I urge you to take advantage of the next one, hand on heart you won’t regret it.
Paintings and drawings by Cathy, Chris M, Chris, David, Gerry, Sandra, Sue, Tom and Tony.
