Passing through...

...drawing in panels, and different ways to love the world

People passing through Cambridge. Drawn on a lovely few day stopover here on our drive down to Cornwall over the summer.

My PhD supervisor died last week and I felt so very sad. He was a remarkable human. I always begin to write that he was ‘mad’ but then I think about it and realise that I actually mean he had a loud wild laugh and also extraordinary clarity. He was utterly unique - hilarious and deeply serious, stubborn and joyful. A truly larger than life character whose impact on the world, particularly the little island of Tasmania (where I lived while I met my husband and where I did my PhD), was huge. As Australian writer Richard Flanagan (another Tasmanian) said so well, there is a very large hole in Tasmania’s forest without Jamie.

I learned this news whilst visiting Sweden with my parents where I was in love with the colours and everything old. In particular the old colourful timber houses that sit amidst and upon and within the granite boulders that make up lots of the Stockholm archipelago. I was thinking about how at home these houses are in the landscape. How much they added to the sense of place and how they looked built for a ‘good life’. Built with so much colour and also with human hands, nestled in the world around them. Unsurprisingly, I wanted to stop and stay and live in one. Probably a yellow one, with a moss covered roof and a garden filled with old trees… and maybe even a green plastic watering can.

so much warmth! It’s like this place was built for autumn.

Spot the green plastic watering can :)

Jamie taught me a lot about loving the world. Dave and I got married in a beautiful piece of bushland near where we lived - atop a beautifully forest hill almost in the middle of the city of Hobart, Tasmania. I loved it because of how beautiful it was and also because it was where we strolled in the evenings. Jamie came to our wedding and told me how wonderful it was that we loved this place as he had fought to save it. It was only still there because he had spent hours campaigning to protect it and had shared with everyone all its beauty and the unique plants and animals that made it home. Jamie arrived in Tasmania in 1970 (I think), fell in love with the highlands and decided to stay there for the rest of his life to learn about them and share this love with others. He did. And in doing so changed the island for the better. He shared powerfully its unique beauty and this helped people appreciate it and treasure it. His love and work made it easier for people like me to love it too.

I can’t imagine this connection to a place. Or commitment.

I think for a long time I thought I just hadn’t found my ‘place’. The one where you just arrive at and know it’s the right one. But the more places I’ve seen the more I realise I love so so so so very many. And I am greedy. I always want to see more. I worry that perhaps this makes me a kind of parasite. I love places so much with my eyes. I wander through them and soak them in and they fill me up. They fuel my imagination. I take their photograph. I draw them. I imagine worlds and stories that might take place in them. And then I tend to move on. People like Jamie see them and love them and then stay there and care for them. Perhaps this is real love, when there’s work involved too.

Such a richness. I feel like this is what lives should all look like. A bounty of beautiful houses and fruit filled trees.

I think loving a place with this kind of depth also comes for lots of people through food. The little island we stayed in near Stockholm was filled not just with beautiful colourful houses nestled into their surrounds, but also so so many bountiful apple trees. There was a cafe there that only opened sometimes on sunny days where I think the owner was famous for serving apple and rhubarb pies in their beautiful garden, completed by an ancient apple tree. I walked past often, hoping it might open (it didn’t). But I loved to imagine the kitchen and the joy of preparing a pie with fruit straight from trees in the garden. I guess this is how most people once enjoyed pie. I was there with my mum - who has a beautiful old apple tree in her garden - and thought of her mum, my nana, who did too. And then made this drawing of an imagined woman in an imagined kitchen baking pie out of fruit gathered from the garden.

Image making as a way to love the world?

A friend, another Tasmanian, surprised me one day while we were doing our PhDs together. He asked me what I’d do with my life if if anything was possible, if I could do anything at all. I said “be an illustrator” (far from what I was doing which was a PhD in human geography) and he asked me why I wasn’t doing that. I said because I felt like I should do something that was ‘useful’ to the world. He laughed and asked why I didn’t think that illustrating would be useful and said that was the catholic in me coming through (I was raised in a strict catholic household although never believed a word of it so hadn’t realised these things can come baked in). I realised then that I’d never thought about drawing or art making or loving the world through images as being something ‘useful’. Until that moment I’d thought of it as decoration, as excess, as something optional, an extra. Rather than perhaps being essential to humans making sense of the world.

Before Sweden, my parents and I went back to Bergen (see this other post for Dave and my visit there in the winter). This time it was autumn and I was enraptured with the colours.

And also, like always, all the tiny houses. I cannot imagine that it can be real for someone to live in a home with a waterfall in their back garden, or in a place where lives must always feel so miniscule compared to the geography and world around. Again, I wanted to choose a tiny house and move straight in (in this case maybe a blue one with a tiny red shed for a kayak). I didn’t draw at all while I was there, but took thousands (literally) of photos and felt so overwhelmed by the magic of the world. I don’t know what to do with this yet, but started by playing with some quick (and very colourful for me), panels.

Drawn from imagination and photos from the fjords around Bergen. I need to work out a better way to explore these.

I have really been enjoying working with panels lately as a way to try to capture the multi-dimensions of a place in a single page. Illustration already does this better than a photo, and a page of illustrations of the same place throughout the day, or the same place all in one moment but zooming in and out and looking around, does this even better. The first place I did this recently was sitting in it, in person (always my favourite way), in North Berwick on a morning’s drawing trip out from Edinburgh. As soon as I had made this, I knew I wanted to make more.

North Berwick

I then tried it again in Edinburgh… drawn on location in two different days. I picked one street and just tried to find all the bits of it that I found interesting. I love how immediately it feels like a story. And how the place somehow comes alive - time seems more real and a sense of story becomes prominent.

One of Edinburgh’s most loved streets - Cockburn street in the Old Town.

I have been trying to connect this to my picture book making as well and started experimenting with making my characters do things in panels on a page to help generate ideas.

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It often feels impossible to capture the feelings of awe and delight I have when I am in such magical places in images but for some reason I feel compelled to try. And I now that I have spent so many years doing this, I can’t actually imagine my life not making images. I can’t imagine not wanting to share my observations of the wonder and beauty that I get to witness in the world with others. And I think I even believe that it matters to share this beauty - although this has taken me time.

Passing through

Maybe for me it’s not about finding the place that pulls me close and demands I care for it. Or maybe I don’t have to pick one and try to make myself do this. Maybe it’s not about finding my own little colourful cottage on a granite rock nestled in a giant landscape with an apple tree. Maybe it’s okay to love more broadly and just pass on through all these incredible places with great appreciation. Take from them what fuels me and keep going. Or maybe it’s actually not at all. I’m actually still not quite sure.

I do know though that image making is my way to share my love of the world. And I think perhaps one of Jamie’s greatest legacies was that he found a way to share his deep love of the world with others. He lived his life so boldly and loved the world so very deeply - and for Jamie this world was everything from a grand urban blue gum to the teeniest of tiniest little mosses, to pet cats and to all the people he taught and spent his life with. I feel so lucky to have learned from Jamie - particularly how much it matters to love the world deeply and to work out how to share this. Two weeks before he died he held a party. It was a three book book launch (he was a prolific writer) and a birthday party and as it turned out, a farewell. I couldn’t be there but I have been told that he started his speech with a great big “I love you all”, that he cried for the loss he has witnessed of so many of the things he loves deeply, and that he laughed really really really loudly.

People passing through one of the beautiful parks in Cambridge. Drawn sitting under a tree soaking up this beautiful mini city.

PS. For those reading hoping for a shop update… its coming soon! Next week I hope and I’ll send another newsletter then. Just waiting on test prints from my printer :)

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