Therapy started to radically change my life when I began to incorporate it with my artistic practice. For me, it wasn’t about mindfully colouring in a mandala (although I’m not knocking it). It was, as I have been documenting through this newsletter, a combination of a brilliant therapist who asked the right questions, listening to the podcast I write about here, and finally understanding that ‘doing’ the work is a different thing than ‘understanding’ the work. For me, doing the work involves a creative act where my hands figure out how to make what my thoughts are thinking.
Writing is a big part of that, but writing is something I find too easy. I can always find a word to substitute for an action. Using my hands to paint or sew, blow glass or mould ceramics is a lot harder. It requires my mind and body to collaborate to come up with a tangible, workable solution. It is work that requires me to let go of any notion of perfection in outward terms. Making what I feel is a very different thing to making what looks right. This is about satisfying something inside of me rather than gaining praise from someone external to me.
The act of feeling my way into a creative work is something entirely new to me and where that alchemical magic happens. I have learned to make art to feel better. When I make something like that, it connects me to what I feel and it allows me to move that feeling from a locked off space in my head to a space outside of myself where I can work on it, because I have room to move around it and negotiate with it. That series of actions allows room for change and growth on the inside and the outside. There is a sense of connection and flow between all the parts of my life that has been missing for so long.
That’s something that Anna Chapman Parker understands and writes about so effortlessly in her book Understorey: A Year Among The Weeds.
Over the course of a year, Anna takes her sketching materials out with her at every opportunity. Working in ink on paper she sets herself the goal of noticing and capturing the weeds she passes on her daily round. The sketches are informal, off the cuff experiments in truly looking at what is in front of her. On school runs, dog walks, while waiting for trains, she hunkers down and begins to capture wild life on the streets of an ordinary town.
This is an extraordinary book at many levels. This is not about lofty artworks, created by artists who demand space and time and extraordinary materials to make art. This is about making art out of necessity, curiosity and what you have, whether it’s a snatched moment, or the back of an envelope. This feels like the art of need rather than desire, or maybe, beautifully, both.
This is art made at the margins. The weeds creep through cracks, edge their way into derelict lots, gain purchase in gutters and by door steps. The work is done at the fringes of daily routine, in the dead spaces of waiting for school to finish, while pasta boils, while a child’s patience holds. The tenacity of the weeds matched by the tenacious will of the artist to literally and metaphorically make something of this moment.
In this art practice, life encroaches all the time. Children, dogs, curious strangers, the weather. Anna figures out ways to encompass and incorporate what’s happening. As she writes about the drawing, she marks moments of decision, questions about whether it’s right to include or remove things or make gestures towards things like the movement of wind or rain. Her thoughts, her seeing and the movement of her hands on the paper must come together over and over again in these moments, editing, pruning and finally making something out of all these thoughts and impressions that wasn’t there moments before. She is generous enough to show us repeatedly the magic in the making. That interrogative spell that fires thought into ink into fixity on the page.
What is so generous about this process is how willing Anna is to be vulnerable in the moment. She notes the times where she doesn’t know how to begin to draw, or where to end. She marks how often she doesn’t know what the plant in front of her is. She never knows how long she will have to draw. There is a willingness on her part to enter into the unknowing, the uncomfortable, open-ended moment of insecurity and do it anyway. This is the very definition of art as a practice, not as a perfectly finished work in a gilded frame, hung high on a wall out of reach. This is not about the end of the work. This is about the life of the work and the work itself.
Reading this book, I felt a consciousness of it as a living thing in my hands. It carries you along in the moments of its making. I’d say that it has a filmic quality, but it’s far more connected than that. Anna has the ability to carry you with her into her mind and eye and hand as she works. She says:
‘This kind of sensate knowing feels different to verbal information. I believe it differently because it’s backed up by my body, and this in turn makes it significantly more memorable. It's usefulness is felt rather than told and even without further botanical context it feels meaningful because it relates to how I experience and move through my environment.’
I hope this post doesn’t make the book sound dull and worthy, because it is the opposite of what I mean to convey. The drawings between the diary entries and the inclusion of other, inspirational works mean that this is so much more than I could ever write about. In fact I don’t know why you’re reading my words when you could be reading hers. Just go and read it.
I recently attended an art retreat in Norway and one of the offerings was called “Enchanted Botanicals” (Jenny Brown is the artist). The class was devoted to drawing flowers and layering various paints and inks to give the drawing a dreamy depth. Understorey sounds like the perfect complement to the class. Thanks!