I’m hopeless at drawing… I’m good at drawing…
I recently mentioned the question of what you call yourself as someone who plays music in my post following a songwriting workshop presented by Simon Austin and Angie Hart of Frente. That was: there is no actual point that qualifies you as a ‘musician’; what matters is that you enjoy and practise making music.
This resonated with me as someone who has always felt reluctant to call myself an artist. I put myself in the self-imposed ‘hopeless at drawing’ category way back in primary school, and I know I’m not alone in having done this. If anything, it seems most of us did this, in exactly the same way as girls slip into the you’re-not-fat-I’m-fat routine. Whether or not we really believe it, it messes with the psyche and that thinking can be a lifetime’s frustrating habit to challenge. Like handwriting (which I’m also self-conscious about), there’s something in me that will always cast moral judgement on my ability to shape visual forms on the page. Now, I have no qualms about saying I am not good at drawing because I don’t naturally enjoy it, so don’t practise it and therefore am not skilled at it. There are times I’ll make myself pick up a pen and doing a quick sketch on a disposable note page just to show myself I have the potential to grow and refine myself as an illustrator, but it just doesn’t float my boat I’m happy to leave it there.
What I do enjoy is using a needle and thread and a woven fabric. There’s something about pushing a linear fibre through a flat surface in various places, over and over, to create those visual forms. I’ve loved sewing since I was in primary school (I got my stitching badge at Brownies for making a ‘sleeping bag for a white mouse’). It’s a form of 3D modelling that excites me. I’m a functional maker at heart, but I do have a soft spot for needle/thread illustration. I still have an alphabet sampler I cross-stitched in early high school, with a row of cats looking up at the letters; it has a tiny smudge when a gust of wind flipped the fabric onto the dusty car the day I took it to get framed. A friend still has the red dressing table mat with the dragon border I tapestried for her, in the time before love and marriage. As a newlywed, I spend months in secret embroidering in blackwork a selection of W.W. Denslow’s 1900 illustrations from The Wonderful Wizard of OZ for our Cotton wedding anniversary. I never got around to framing or hanging it, mostly because I liked how it seemed to retain its secret magic folded up still in the black wrapping paper and white ribbon. It stayed there for nearly eleven years, moving house with us three times.
It’s finally hanging on our bedroom wall but would still be packed away if it wasn’t for a call for artists within my workplace to participate in the inaugural staff SALA group exhibition. SALA, or South Australian Living Artists, is an annual event encouraging established and novice artists to show their creative talents. (Being an SA festival, it’s naturally a massive program.) I also submitted a new piece, done in in various shades of green splitstich thread on plain white silk, tracing a scale map of the bus, train, tram and foot routes I take to travel from my come in the CBD to and between my various libraries, which were themselves depicted as Sturt Desert Pea flowers embroidered onto colour photocopied street maps and sealed into badge components. If the exhibition was a competition for prettiest work, I certainly wouldn’t win any prizes; but I’ll never forget the feeling of pride seeing people stop by and pause, taking their time to let the meaning sink in and then figure out what the unmarked lines represented, matching it up with the maps in their minds, hearing them use words like ‘innovative’ and ‘abstract’ and ‘interesting’. I’m currently embroidering freehand the lyrics to Queen’s ‘Princes of the Universe’ in white thread onto a black ribbon for this year’s next SALA exhibition.
I wish I could pick up a pencil and just draw. I have these fantasies about whipping out a sketchbook to draw a portrait or building, or having someone being blown away at the vigour and confidence of my notepad doodles. But that’s never going to happen, which is okay because neither will some self-depricating scenario where for some reason I need to draw to save myself.