I guess I assumed that landscape would be a good subject because the model is cheap, sits still and doesn’t criticize after a bad days work. That turned out to be especially wrong in Alaska where the hard landscape is also an earthquake zone. I couldn’t believe a landscape so big could be so fluid. The more I worked there the more I remembered that it’s all in flux : boulders, clouds, grass. mountains .. That fluidity is it, really. The landscape’s timeline is no less violent and unpredictable than ours, it just takes longer. Somebody told me that the Cuillins are among the oldest surface rocks in the world - meeting the volatile weather from the second biggest ocean in the world. Alchemy !

I can’t wait to see/draw clouds streaming/boiling/roiling through the Cullins…

Drawing is your communication medium: maybe it’s your form of writing. You were the one who opened my eyes to how a drawing reveals its own timeline.

There’s also a connection in the way Japanese calligraphy flows down a column or panel, much as your marks flow in a narrative way across a similarly proportioned space. And the calligraphy masters do that thing of practising their marks so as to internalise them, acquiring a skill so that they can forget it and focus on the work itself.

When making calligraphy with a brush, the classic technique is t keep the wrist rigid and the brush vertical, making all the movement from the elbow and shoulder, much as certain southpawed people I know write.

Anyway, just an observation…

I really will sort out how to put everybody’s links onto my page but for now it’s head down in the studio to finish a portrait I’m putting in for the Threadneedle prize. So that’s my day planned then - staring onto the middle distance and talking to myself.

Exactly. I find linear drawing both satisfying and frustrating - I love the decisiveness of a hard line. But I feel that lines are meant to be bent, squished and merged. Just as you can hear Charlie Parker running away with a simple block chord tune like Body and Soul and giving it back transformed and magical. Whenever I make a line drawing I wish for the tonal fields that only a brush can give you. Give me a brush and I want to sharpen it all the time .. might try drawing and painting at the same time.

I once tried to work out the task of doing edges, not as lines, but as carefully rendered transitions with the change varying somewhat like you might use pressure to distinguish between jazz, rock and classical, etc music as an armchair conductor. I drew all sorts of graphs and played a lot with my set of airbrushes. I really liked the results of the airbrush particularly on crumpled fabric and on rice papers, but the lack of tactility drove me up a wall. Ultimately I went back to the drawing and painting you know.

but also have a site with my sketchbooks on at http://www.sitekreator.com/viviensketches

Adebanji Alade shows daily sketches at http://adebanjialade.blogspot.com/

A friend Katherine shows regular sketches and talks about processes and thought here href=”http://travelsketch.blogspot.com/
“>http://travelsketch.blogspot.com/

We have a joint blog (I had the idea and invited Katherine and Lindsay to help set it up - K’s tech knowledge is excellent). We thought about who to invite (artists interested in painting water) and the result is Watermarks - where we all talk about thoughts behind work, gee each other along, crit and provoke each other into further interesting work.
http://watermarks-art.blogspot.com/. It’s been great to be part of it.

There is of course Urban Sketchers as well -a huge site, though they tend to show images but not talk in depth

Tina Mammoser - The Cycling Artist - also has an excellent blog and she’s a fellow member of Watermarks

Thanks for joining in - I’m going to publish links on 31st May to the blogs of those who took part