Night Drawings
I’ve always enjoyed working at night. Something about starting as the day is ending and then working into the small hours as the world goes quiet feels like a bonus, like having extra time. When we first moved into Peckham I had a studio at home. I would often paint after dark, music or radio on, losing track of the time. With a busy life, balancing work and trying to maintain a practice, night sessions were an important way of squeezing the painting in. One particular memory was of painting the night that Princess Diana crashed, and died, in Paris. I was working on a painting of a table, heavily laden with the paraphernalia of a birthday party…cake, ballons, drinks, a huge jelly. I had the world service playing on the radio and reports started to come in of the accident, with initial suggestions that the princess had been injured. Half-listening to the report served as a backdrop to the developing painting until I ran out of a couple of key colours I was using and called it a night. I was woken a few hours later by my girlfriend telling me that Diana was dead. The whole experience was all the more surreal for having been up all night painting and listening to the reports that had turned out to be incorrect. I didn’t keep the painting. Destroyed, but it remains quite present in my memory.
Since the new year I have been drawing daily, initiated by undertaking Alfredo Cristiano’s WOBBLY WONKY at home ART RESIDENCY (written about in a previous post). In the last week I’ve stayed up late drawing on several occasions and have had that same feeling of bonus time, of being up and working when everyone else is asleep. The drawings are all being made intuitively, starting with a form or shape that feels familiar from recent studio work and from the last drawings I’ve made, then quickly developing into something else. But certain things are repeating, asserting themselves. Zeppelin like ridged forms, wrapped sweets, winged objects, the appearance of limbs. I feel like I am expanding a vocabulary, one that may later appear in the paintings.
It’s got me been thinking about Louise Bourgeois’s “Insomnia Drawings”. As Bourgeois grew older, she developed the habit of drawing at night when she couldn’t sleep. “During her sleepless nights, she countered the assault of reminiscences on her mind by drawing and writing, writing and drawing, in a kind of nightly exorcism that filled page after page with imagery and text. Like counting or breathing—recommended methods for calming the ever-awake—Bourgeois’ gestures on paper were grounded in repetition, akin to the recitation of words into the long hours of night” (Nancy Spector on the Hauser & Wirth website). There is something in this repetition of form that I’m recognising in my own nocturnal drawings. It is comforting to make and remake, to lose myself into the act of drawing without too much self-consciousness and I think that this is something to do with drawing at night. As the quote about Bourgeois suggests, this is drawing as a way of keeping other things at bay.
As is clear to anyone looking at my work, Philip Guston is an ever-present influence. Guston often worked at night. His daughter Musa Mayer’s biography is entitled “Night Studio”, reflecting this habit of her father’s. I first read it shortly after leaving Winchester School of Art in the early 90’s, not long after she published it, and I’ve since reread it at least a dozen times. It’s one of my touchstones. In it there is an account of Guston working at night in his New York loft. It describes him tacking a large canvas directly on the wall and painting away, not standing back. Painting everything he can see around him: the stacks of paintings, the studio objects, furniture, the wires hanging down. Eventually he is done, spent, exhausted by his night of working. He goes home and wakes his wife, keen to share his efforts with her. They return to the studio to look. Guston feels like a champion, a “real painter”. But when he returns the following morning to see what he’s created nothing has “stuck”. The painting is all surface. He destroys it.
I know this feeling.
Nice!