"Canoe Trip" #4

I looked around to find Alex lying on his back, with his hands behind his head and legs akimbo; resting his feet on either end of the paddle that was laid crossways on the canoe. I had to laugh. It would have made a good drawing, and I wasn’t sure if I should have been drawing him instead. But it was a shame that in the excitement of the moment I forgot to take a photograph.

A couple of young boys, with nothing better to do than to satisfy their curiosity, paddled out in a canoe to see what we were up to. Alex seized the opportunity and asked them to position themselves so I could include them in the drawing. I wanted to capture the dramatic, head on perspective of the canoe as it came towards us, but we drifted and the moment passed, so I had to settle for a side on view that allowed me to add some detail to the boys, but I was disappointed at missing the opportunity of a more dynamic composition. My energy was all but used up, and as concentration levels fell I realised how stiff my back and shoulders were. One cheek of my rear end had gone completely numb. I put down the pencil and pad, lifted and rolled my shoulders, stretched out my back, and stretched out my legs. I was done. When we got ashore, as we hauled the canoe up the beach something gave way in my lower back, and a deep spasm of pain ran close to the spine on the left side. I pretended to lift but my strength was gone. A fisherman came to help. I straighten up, but knew something was wrong. ‘It isn’t that bad, just give it a few days and you’ll be fine’, I said to myself reassuringly, as I walked stiffly up the beach and sat down on the sand to recover from the shock.

"Canoe Trip" #3

An oblique gash ran across the upper face of the large boulder, where at some point an impact had occurred, splintering a piece off. I let my eye guide my hand, taking only furtive glances at where the pencil was going. The edge of the canoe cut in to me and was getting painful to sit on. In a race against dwindling endurance I tried not to waste a single mark. With the complexity of rocks on the shoreline, drawn, I moved on to the buildings and vegetation. I remembered how Pierre Bonnard had used a pencil in his small sketches to create textures that vibrated with light. As I struggled to find marks to describe the variety and intensity of the textures, I began to understand how drawing and painting crossed paths in the texture of marks, and how to render colour using just a pencil. I had discovered something, and though the lesson was complete the drawing was still far from finished. The buildings sat haphazardly within the undulating rhythm of the land; their silver-grey grass roofs: slanting, mismatched parallelograms, with the feeling they jostled for space amongst the vegetation. Gradually, the subtleties came into place, and the drawing achieved solidity and depth.

Canoe Trip #2

We arrived opposite a hamlet of huts nestled in amongst trees and tall grass. On the shore a large boulder punctuated an interconnected chain of rocks and stones, like the centerpiece in a, rough-hewn necklace.  A small beach lay shrouded in overhanging trees. Five different varieties of tree could be counted in the view as a whole, each with its own distinct foliage and shade of green. But all were darkened by comparison to emerald green hills, sweeping up to the pale, ethereal blue sky.

 I lifted my paddle and pointed.

“This looks good,” I said, and Alex laid down his paddle, moved forward to the middle of the canoe and squatted down to get a grip on the large rock we had brought with us for an anchor. As he struggled to lift it the canoe tipped violently over to one side. Then he seemed to summon up all his strength and, with one deft motion lifted the rock up onto the edge of the canoe and let it plunge, with rope running after it into the oily dark water. The canoe drifted but, as Alex pulled  the slack out of the rope, it moved back to into position over where the anchor was weighed. At last, with the rope pulled tight the canoe tilted slightly to one side and came to rest. Getting organised to do a drawing of the view in front of me was a ritual that ended with a well sharpened a pencil. I scanned the subject until I had captured its essential features in my mind before starting. The canoe drifted and skewed about. Alex paddled, trying to straighten it out. I shifted around and no matter how much I tried, couldn’t get comfortable, so I settled for a position that seemed least likely to cause capsize.

"Canoe Trip" #1

The canoe was a big one which according to Alex would be more stable in the water. For an anchor we tied a large rock to a length of rope. The rock had to be heavy enough to anchor the canoe in one place, and not so heavy as to sink it. As we struggled to lift it, the margin between the two seemed pretty slim. With the help of the fisherman, who had kindly lent us his canoe and paddles for free, we dragged the canoe down the beach and launched it into the Lake. I climbed in first and Alex climbed in behind and pushed off. The canoe drifted away from the shore and began to rock. This continued until I got more stability by wedging my feet firmly against the sides of the canoe, and just dipping the tip of the paddle into the water. As we got into a rhythm the canoe sped up, and an image flickered before my eyes, like an old Super 8 movie, of Alex and myself in the future, in our own canoe travelling from village to village along the Lakeshore.

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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.