A room with a view

Drawing where I'd rather be, or, realising my illustration superpower

One of the most delightful ways to spend some hours… creating a most excellent room with an incredible view.

In my last piece, I wrote about the way my obsession with places has made me a nomad. One of the consequences of this, is that sometimes I long for a home. This is no more so then when the days get shorter and the wind a little colder and walking home in the evening is filled with little glimpses into other people’s private lounge rooms or kitchens or interior worlds.

Sometimes I get glimpses of beautiful floor carpets and shelves filled with books. There are house plants, and dogs curled up on cushions. Other times I just see a golden glow and I can imagine lovely lamps and teapots and record players with fabulous music filling rooms. Obviously, nobody’s lives are actually that perfect, but such little glimpses and glowing windows let me imagine they may be so and wish, I had such a home, or even room, of my own.

The lights pouring out of Edinburgh’s beautiful old buildings always seem so warm and inviting. They rarely have any blue in them - the cold lighting of rooms from my childhood classrooms or hospitals - but beautiful yellows filled with warmth.

The other moment I long for a home is when I see pictures of, or actually get the chance to look inside other people’s workspaces - the glorious world of artists studios. I work, not from a lovely barn with a wood fire at it’s heart and a view of the mountains (one of my many studio dream situations), but from whatever table space we can fit in wherever we happen to be living. At the moment I am lucky as I have my desk nestled into a window with a lovely long view.

Current workspace… complete with raindrops on the window. That’s when it’s at it’s finest ;)

In my dreams if I didn’t have an old barn with a fire at it’s centre, I would have this incredibly beautiful “kitchen house” built by the wonderful Japanese quilt designer, Yoshiko Jinzenji. Or perhaps the incredible pottery studio of Laima Grigone - although I would also live in her beautiful space… as being an illustrator I don’t need quite so much room for work (her website has a beautiful tour of her studio). If I was dreaming really big, I perhaps would have the incredible barn that the wonderful illustrator Sophie Blackall has renovated into a retreat space for the people working in the children’s book world - Milkwood Farm. I adored watching Sophie and team renovate this space and one day… I hope I will make it there for a retreat!

Dreaming of a room with a view of the sea during the first COVID lockdown…

I drew my first room with a view in the first COVID lockdown when we were only allowed out of the house for single hour a day. I was living in a village just out of Cambridge at the time and everyday was depressingly the same. I think not only was life so limited, but the weather was my least favourite ever - day after day after day of endless blue skies. Every day was exactly the same. Nothing changed and my soul started to get swallowed up. I really didn’t know how to cope. Usually, if feeling that down, I would have taken myself somewhere - either far away to a different landscape, like the sea, or even to a cafe where the music playing wouldn’t be my own and I would have something different to look at. I wanted to go back to the past, but we can never go there.

I was doing an online drawing course at the time, and was faced with an exercise to draw the same view out the window at multiple different times of day. This is probably a great exercise, but at the time, it made me feel like crying. I actually couldn’t bring myself to do it as I was so tired of that view, so sick of the endless sunshine, so very depressed at the sight of the same walls and the same things. The days were also so very long, so I felt like even the light didn’t change. I also felt sorry for myself as I longed for a house with my own things. My own books, artworks I loved on the walls, my own cups and plants and all the things that we didn’t have.

I think it was in this moment of quiet desperation that I began to understand what it really means to be an illustrator. Most of my drawing - and definitely all my favourite pieces up until around this time - were drawn from life. They were sketches out in the world of what I could see before me. Yet suddenly I hated my life. I couldn’t find my usual joy at what I could see as it all felt so monotonous. But, one day, I realised, that perhaps I could escape just by spending an hour in a place I would rather be, one I created on a piece of paper.

I found out and really started to feel the superpower of being an illustrator and so I started to draw rooms that I wish were mine in places I couldn’t go - like where there were hills and thus I could see rooftops, or where there were mountains covered in snow. Or where I could sit in a seat inside a window and watch the sea crashing into the beautifully wild cliffs. I escaped the limits imposed on my nomadic self that were making me so miserable, not by going anywhere but by settling deep into my imagination and drawing places I’d rather be.

Perhaps my favourite of all my rooms with a view. To be nestled in a tiny room but with a gigantic window in the middle of a snowy forest with cushions and plants and teapots… still, even though we are now free, a constant dream

Now, in hindsight, I think being forced briefly not to go anywhere, was an incredible blessing for me. Discovering just how satisfying escaping into my imagination with my paints and pens and pencils could be was perhaps essential to becoming a good illustrator, and I think it would have taken me a lot longer to get there had I not been made to stay still. Now, when I am not sure what to draw, or start feeling stuck in any way, I still draw these rooms with a view. I love to conjure up the interior (briefly become a designer), create the shape and space of the room (briefly enter the head of an architect) and then put it all somewhere with a view I wish I had (the geographer in me - that’s what I have a PhD in - comes alive). It is such a delightful way to satisfy my longing for a home as well as remind myself of the extraordinarily precious power that imagination and illustration have to enrich a life.

One day I will have a window seat with lovely cushions where I can sit and drink tea and ponder the world. And if not, at least I can draw it