Hills of Ruarwe #6

Alex absorbed the connection between the marks I was making and the world they described; and his eyes darted as mine did, over and back from subject to drawing. It wasn’t long before a group of curious children and men gathered to watch. The chatter of voices grew as they closed in a semicircle around us. A small child was gently tugging at my elbow and a man sat on his haunches beside me, booming out a commentary. I was getting tired and struggling with the constant movement of the men sawing. At last I was able to tackle the minute detail of the village; and finally the composition was framed on either side by cassava plants, with their distinct lupin-like leaves, and at the top by the branches of an overhanging mango tree. To draw the leaves of cassava and mango I used a short hand style of drawing, roughly sketching them in, approximating their complex forms.

“You’ve done it,” Alex yelled out. I looked at the drawing and tried to see it as a whole, but I was uncertain, so I let weariness decide and put the pencil down, and relaxed the tension out of my neck and shoulders. Now everybody wanted to inspect the drawing. A wave of chatter, animated with laughter and loud exclamations followed the pad, as it was passed from hand to hand. Dusty fingers traced over the paper and tapped on details of the drawing. It was getting mauled, and I waited impatiently to get it back. It was time to leave, so we said our goodbyes and set off on the long walk back to the Ruarwe. How pleased I was that this time it would be down hill.

The Hills of Ruarwe #5

In my mind I traced out the composition onto the paper: the saw and its two operatives, the rectangular frame; and in the foreground a tin mug on a tree stump. Within the ellipse of the lip of the mug, lay another ellipse traced by the line of the water inside. The ellipses were at out of kilter with each other; the mug being tilted due to the unevenness of the surface it was resting on, and the water tilted in opposition to redefined the level. These dissonant, elliptical rhythms were echoed in the concentric growth rings on the face of the tree stump. The background was pale, sandy-brown earth, bleached by the glare of the sun, with the village where we stopped to get water on the way up, marked out in subtle monochrome shades, like a Japanese ink drawing.

The Hills of Ruarwe #4

We had arrived. I threw myself to the ground, exhausted, and sat gazing into the distance, completely without thought or design, neutralized by the shear intensity of what I was experiencing. 
“Come on then, aren’t you going to draw?” Alex blurted out, impatiently. I wasn’t thinking about doing anything, just trying to keep myself together, recovering from the climb, drifting in a kind of emptiness; in a state where all I could do was notice, not to react things. My attention was drawn back to the blade of the saw moving up and down, driven by the rhythm of the two men working it, and I remembered why we had come.
Slowly and deliberately, to conserve energy, I took a drawing pad and cardboard tube containing a pencil, knife and eraser out of my bag. A stub of a pencil was all I had left. I began to sharpen it, willing myself to focus, as I paired wood, then graphite to a fine, tapering point. My eraser was a lump of rubber cut out of the heel of my shoe that left black smudges and didn’t work very well.