Woody

On By Michael Richards (certainline)In art, illustration, inspiration, music, Woody Woodmansey14 Comments
The Musician (Birthday card for a friend) A5, ink and watercolour, 2020

These days I seem to derive more inspiration from musicians than any other artists. It could be that I’m reading more about musicians or listening to more podcasts about music, but it’s perhaps with the passing of years that older musicians have something important to tell us.

Recently, a podcast called A Word in your Ear released an interview with David Bowie’s drummer from his Spiders from Mars era, Woody Woodmansey. I know, I know – that sounds about as engaging as a wet weekend in Blackpool, but one section of it stopped me in my tracks.

At the age of 18, Woody was living in Hull and had been offered a promotion in the factory where he worked. He would be given the deposit for a house, a new car every two years, and earn enough for a nice holiday every year. At the same time, guitarist Mick Ronson had asked him to move down to London to drum for the, as yet, barely famous Bowie.

Woody sat in his parents’ living room pondering this choice. He was standing at a professional crossroads: job security for life or a precarious living drumming in a rock band. The TV was on, a soundtrack to his thoughts.

Woody projected himself forward 40+ years. He’s a 65 year old factory foreman  sitting with his grandchildren in his own house in the suburbs of Hull, a new car in the driveway. His grandchildren are watching a music programme and he says to them, “I once had the chance to do that.” What a massive regret that would have been, Woody told his podcast hosts. He decided to move to London and join Bowie’s band.

We can be glad that he decided against the factory.  Although he only drummed with Bowie for a handful of years before being unceremoniously dumped when the ever-creative front man changed direction, Woody has maintained a musical career to the present day. He need have no regrets when talking to his grandchildren.

I never thought to project like that when I was young. I wonder now if my life choices would have been different had I done so. Somehow I think not. I seem to have been blown by the wind and carried by the tide for most of my life. There was never a time when the choices were as plain and stark as Woody’s.

But perhaps it’s useful to detach one’s self from one’s own life, with all its messy decisions and choices, and try to see things from the outside. Suddenly it becomes easier to make the scales balance, to make that mental SWOT analysis and find a way ahead. I think we can all learn from Woody’s experience in that Hull sitting room half a century ago.

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.

The Netflix effect

On By Michael Richards (certainline)In A day that lay sly and unseen, art, Christmas, grief, illustration, ink, inspiration, language, Quotations, Thomas Hardy21 Comments

We’ve a long night ahead of us, old chum (A4/ ink and coloured pencil/ 2024)

If you ever worry about WordPress’ search engine optimization and its ability to extend the reach of your posts, there’s no need. Here’s a story about how effective WordPress is as a blogging medium.

In March 2017, when I had a lot to say and posted every week, I found myself short of time as I had to attend the London Book Fair. So I posted an image from my life drawing class and three random quotations, one of which was from Thomas Hardy:

“She philosophically noted dates as they came past in the revolution of the year. Her own birthday, and every other day individualised by incidents in which she had taken some share. She suddenly thought, one afternoon, that there was another date, of greater importance than all those; that of her own death; a day which lay sly and unseen among the other days of the year, giving no sign or sound when she annually passed over it; but not the less surely there. When was it?”

“A day which lay sly and unseen among the other days of the year” – a quote used in the Netflix version of One Day by novelist David Nicholls. In case you haven’t seen it – and I only managed a handful of episodes – it concerns the decades-spanning love story of Dex and Em as they reunite on the same day every year.

People searching for the origin of that quote found their way to my humble blog and my stopgap post. Of the 11,500 visitors to my blog this year, 9,200 landed on that post. Of those nine thousand visitors, very few ‘liked’ the post and virtually none followed me. I’m not complaining: it was nice to have them visit and a pleasure to be able to solve the mystery of that quote for them. Doubt not the power of WordPress’ SEO however: why my post came second on the list is down to the efficiency of our host’s techie staff.

So on this positive note, I wish you a happy Christmas, Hanukkah, Pancha Ganapati, Chahrshanbeh Soori, winter solstice, or whatever you celebrate to bring light to these dark days of winter and conflict in the wider world. No matter where your soul takes you, have a blessed holiday season.

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 Folktale Challenge

On By Michael Richards (certainline)In art, coloured pencil, dip pen, drawing, folklore, illustration, ink, inspiration8 Comments
Lost (30 cms x 30 cms, ink and coloured pencil, 2023)

How I hate January with its post-Christmas comedown, its grey skies of piddling rain, endless newspaper articles about ‘new year, new you’, veganuary, and giving up drinking. Giving up? Without gin I’d never make it to February 1st.

So let me infuse your January with a little bit of cheerful whimsy. As autumn turns to winter each year, a group of illustrators on Instagram initiate something called Folktale Week. For those of you who eschew Instagram because it’s another Zuckerberg owned thing that will steal your soul (I do understand), allow me to share some of my own contributions to that – for illustrators – engaging and stimulating challenge.

We start with the prompt, Lost (above). There are many lost things in folk tales –  lost rings, lost books, lost daughters – but nothing as scary as being a child lost in the forest. Our babes in the wood, apprehensive as night falls, are innocent of the dangers that await them. If only the owl could warn them what is to come… I love drawing stylised winter trees, and was thrilled when someone on Instagram pointed out that the branches looked like a maze, which was my intention.

Sleep (30 cms x 30 cms, ink and coloured pencil, 2023)

For the prompt, ‘Sleep’, I chose the legend of the Sandman. A well-known figure in folklore, the 19th century German tale by E.T.A. Hoffman has him throwing sand in wakeful children’s eyes, causing their eyes to fall out.

So I decided to illustrate Hans Christian Anderson’s more benign version, where the Sandman sprinkles magic dust in children’s eyes and tells them stories to lull them to sleep. He also carries two umbrellas to hold over them: one with pictures inside to provoke sweet dreams for good children, and another that is blank inside if the child has been naughty. No-one’s eyes drop out in the Danish version.

Underground (20 cms x 20 cms, ink and coloured pencil, 2023)

The prompt, Underground, had me looking at Knockers (Cornwall) or Coblynaus (Wales). These are subterranean, troll-like creatures, about 40 cms tall, dressed in archaic miners’ clothes. They are benign if rather mischievous, guiding miners to the richest seams of metal or coal, but stealing their tools or even their sandwiches from their lunchboxes if they weren’t careful.

If you would like to see the rest of the prompts, simply click here. You don’t have to register and you can get away at any time.

I hope this has brought a little light to your cold winter’s day if you’re suffering with me here in the northern hemisphere. As I write, Storm Henk is raging outside my window: we have been warned to fasten down our bins and garden furniture, transport is in disarray, and one man has been killed by a falling tree. Why does it have a Dutch name? Well, despite the idiocy of Brexit, we in Britain name our storms along with the Irish and Dutch meteorological offices, and everyone gets a stab at naming a storm or two.

Whatever it’s called, it’s still cold, wet, and windy (but it’ll soon be Spring).

Have yourself a merry little…

On By Michael Richards (certainline)In art, Christmas, illustration, music16 Comments
Naked Santas II (30 cms x 30 cms; ink and coloured pencil; 2023)

Announcing the An Evening With Fleetwood Mac tour in 2018, the late Christine McVie said it could be the band’s last: “The tour is supposed to be a farewell tour, but you take farewell tours one at a time.”

The same could be said of farewells generally. In my previous post, I implied that I was going to wind down this blog. However I had such a warm reaction – both here in the comments section and privately by e-mail – that I’ve decided to carry on for a while yet. Thank you for all your kind, encouraging remarks.

Talking about music, in the UK there’s a Twitter (does anyone call it X?) based challenge known as Whamaggedon. The idea is, as you go from supermarket to department store doing your Christmas shopping, to get as far into December as you can without hearing Wham’s 1984 hit, Last Christmas. It is surprisingly difficult, as the organiser of this challenge, @pandamoanimum, discovered when she was Whammed on day 3. The problem is that most shops in the UK seem to use a collection called Now That’s What I Call Christmas, which leads off with the Wham song, followed by others equally irritating such as McCartney’s Wonderful Christmastime, Elton John’s Step into Christmas, John Lennon’s miserablist anthem Happy Xmas (War is Over), and (kill me now!) Cliff Richard’s wretched Mistletoe and Wine. It isn’t that there aren’t any great Christmas songs that can stand repeated listening*, just that hardly any are on NTWICC.

As much as Cliff Richard may deserve it, let me not lack generosity – especially at this time of year. Whether you celebrate Christmas for the birth of Christ or an excuse to get loads of gifts, or whether you follow a pagan path and see the winter solstice as the beginning of Spring’s cycle of rebirth, or you’re celebrating Hanukkah which confirms the ideals of Judaism – all these are joyous events. There are Muslim and Buddhist feast days in December too, so most of us have something to celebrate this month. In the Northern hemisphere, where it’s cold and night starts to descend at about 4.30 in the afternoon, and especially in the UK where energy prices are so high we can barely afford to heat our homes, anything to do with counting our blessings and lighting a candle is welcome.

So, have yourself a merry little whatever-you-celebrate. I’ll see you again in the New Year.

*For example, there’s O Come Emmanuel in versions by both Rosie Thomas and Sufjan Stevens, On this Winter’s Night by Lady A; What’s That Sound by J D McPherson; O Tannenbaum by the Vince Guaraldi Trio; and of course, Bob Dylan’s Must Be Santa.

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.

Just like starting over

On By Michael Richards (certainline)In art, artist's block, artistic development, Christmas, dip pen, drawing, illustration, inspiration36 Comments
Angels: Christmas Card Design (15 cms x 15 cms ink and collage 2022)

Time flies. I’ve written nothing on this blog since last March – nearly a year ago. If anyone is still listening, let me explain.

For most of 2022 I suffered from a chronic, non-life-threatening illness, one that has not only sapped my strength but also drained my creativity. I simply had no inspiration. My attempts at drawing and painting were scuppered by the tank being firmly on zero: something I’d never experienced before. I’ve been able to create even in the depths of grief, of loss, of stress – but not during this debilitating ill health.

I was going to post something a few weeks ago about if you want to get back into your creative stride, try an online challenge. Whether your thing is drawing, painting, music, or writing, there are projects on the internet to kick start your creativity. I did one – a delightful drawing challenge about folktales (my contributions are on Instagram) – which really kindled the flame: the research into folktales inspired by a simple key word, thinking through the scenario and the composition, doing the actual drawing – but once the challenge was over the inspiration seeped away once more.

The only thing that combats lack of inspiration caused by ill health is, in my experience, getting better.

However, returning to the art you love gives you a helpful nudge. I looked again at The Art of Richard Thomson – my hero on high, plucked from us so early – and luxuriated in his linework and his humour. I read books by the recently deceased German illustrator, Wolf Erlbruch, and marvelled at his invention in each new project. We visited the Tate Modern Cézanne exhibition with friends not seen since the start of Covid and once again I was thrilled at his way with the humble apple. “Even for Cézanne the apple would only matter if it called up a breast in the painter’s mind…art’s subject is always the human clay,” writes New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik in his wonderful book, At the Strangers‘ Gate.

Slowly, the flame started to sputter into life again. I drew a card for a friend’s significant birthday. A building in a nearby town. Then the Christmas card design above and the angels’ heads below. Pulling in influences and transforming them, feeling creativity flow again as my health improved.

In retrospect, I wish I’d performed some sort of daily drawing exercise, even during the most challenging months of my illness. Taking one object and drawing it every day – no pressure, no expectations, no need for inspiration, just flexing those drawing muscles. It would have kept the spirit buoyant, like the scent of a familiar room, a cocktail on a warm summer’s evening, a conversation with an old friend.

So that’s the story of my non-blogging ten months. Hopefully now that I’m drawing again I can also think of something to say about them. Fingers crossed!

Angel Heads (20 cms x 20 cms ink 2022)