Atelier - About My Art

OBSERVATIONS

Behind The Cotton Wool

And so, in a café in Howden, through the portal of the final page of my little black sketchbook, I begin to see the world as it truly is.

Sitting there, half-hidden behind a menu holder, sketching two people chatting, I feel a bit like Arthur Dent from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, when it dawns on him that it’s not humans, but mice, who are really in charge of the world. But more of that later.

My sketchbooks aren’t my first attempt at understanding who I am, or how I fit into all of this. Photography has long been helping me on that journey. I think of my lens as a divining rod, guiding me to places and moments that enlighten and inform. But sketching has added another layer, fine-tuning my perception of the world around me.

I find working on these little sketched vignettes during my travels remarkably nourishing adding a level of immersive intimacy with place that is hard to achieve with any other medium. When I sketch in a new location, it feels as though I’m creating a sacred space. Sometimes I feel like a filter, with light passing through me onto the paper, much like water through shale.

I’m still working out the relationship between my photographer’s eye and my artist’s eye.

Time will tell, but I can already feel that my journey through light and composition is influencing my sketches, and, in turn, my photography is beginning to take on a more lyrical quality.

Hockney and Hokusai have already shaped my perception of the world through the camera, and I feel both mediums are slowly merging into one. My sketches are emotional counterweights to my photography.

One side effect of being a photographer is a constant watchfulness that brings about a deeper correspondence with the inherent order of things which inevitably finds its way into my work. There’s a trace of it already in my art—shapes, lines, and Fibonacci patterns subtly filter into the scenes, creating recurring forms and perspectives across seemingly completely different pieces.

So my camera and brush hint at an inherent universal pattern, and so too do other artists.

David Gentleman saw the patterns in his travels across these lands,

John Ruskin captured them in the simplest of bricks, Emily Bronte in her Wuthering Heights, Gustav Holst felt them in The Planets and Anni Albers expressed them through her remarkable textiles.

In each new piece of art that I make, I see traces of something familiar. It doesn’t feel like I’m capturing something external, but rather something deep within that echoes the non-human world and this is what I’m sensing as I sketch two ladies in the cafe at Howden.

There’s a quote by Pablo Neruda that illustrates how I feel: “There is another reality, the genuine one, which we lose sight of. This other reality is always sending us hints, which without art, we can’t receive.”

Initially, it was my photography that helped me see the wider picture that took me to a raw truth - something that Douglas Adams (and his mice) hid beneath his irony and humour - that humans are not at the centre of everything. It’s something that I’ve repeated in previous digests.

But my art is guiding me beyond the stark reality of our hubris. It reveals that, despite our flaws and vulnerabilities, each of us holds the power to create something profoundly moving—something that, even in the darkest of places, has the potential to kindle light.

Each time we create—no matter what the medium and regardless of the result—we are holding onto the coattails of something far greater than ourselves. With every stroke, every captured moment, we are tethered to a deeper force, each of us adding our own small flicker to the collective light that pushes against the darkness. It’s not the mastery of the art that matters, but the act of creation itself that connects us to something enduring, something profoundly luminous. What that means is deeply comforting for those of us that feel benign in all that is happening around us: that the simple act of creation pushes back against the darkness.

And so, in the simplicity of a café in Howden, whilst sitting and sketching two people delightfully caught up in their own world, I see the truth as it really is and am reminded of the words of Virginia Woolf. In a passage that is patterned with the rhythm of the cosmos itself, they speak of everything that my pen and brush has taught me:

‘…behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern; that we — I mean all human beings — are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art. Hamlet or a Beethoven quartet is the truth about this vast mass that we call the world. But there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself.’

Take a look at my art:

How it all began

For me sketching started as an act of making sense of my environment and then as a way of understanding the typology of buildings and place.

But it soon became an integral part of my photography and of my life both contributing to my vocation and my wellbeing.

The skill and wisdom I gained from sketching has informed the way I take photographs.

Sometimes I’ve sketched a scene as a precursor to using the camera to bed me into the flow of the process of photography.

Other times I’ve used it to absorb a building, or to become sensitised to the nuance of a place.

My art and the art of others helped me find a new voice through the lens - one that was based upon the act of observation during sketching.

Put together my sketchbooks are fertile ground, they hold a smorgasbord of ideas. They are pointers to future places, photographs, ideas, articles, art. A deep well and resource to reflect upon.

Through life drawing classes I'm learning about the wondrous diversity of the human form and human connection.

I also sketch to dispel anxiety. In one sketchbook next to a watercolour of the Warper’s Trail I’ve written:
‘The practice of sketching out the old lane focused my mind and calmed my anxiety. My anxiety was washed out in the green wash and channelled out through the pencil lines…To know your place, to understand whereby it came about and what marked its hills and valley is truly to feel rooted in something.’

When my dad was in the last few weeks of his life, I sat with him and found solace in the mundane act of sketching a bunch of pegs. Whilst I was sketching I remember the profound feeling of my grief being drawn through the veins in my arm and absorbed by the marks I was making on the page.

During happier times I sketched scenes from my holidays with Dad and it is in this sense that sketches are so powerful - that they become memory realms connecting instantly with the atmosphere of a place.

Then there's finding beauty in the everyday and the mundane.

And then there’s another aspect of sketching that enhances our observation. Susan Fagence Cooper sums it up best when describing John Ruskin’s art:

‘Being aware of how we see the world is intimately bound up with the other things that mattered to Ruskin: learning to draw; taking our time as we stop and look; working out the relationships between a building and the people who built it and used it; being aware of our small place in a vast, ancient world; being thankful but questioning the status quo; stretching ourselves to imagine how it might be. All these ways of being in the world are enhanced by looking more closely. ‘