I knew that this project would bring ups and downs. There would be quiet days, visitor-less days, dead nothing-much-happening days, of course.
But, in truth I’d had no plan as to how I might deal with them.
There’d been snow on the mountains on the way into Ruthin for my fourth drawing day. The air was cold. The Gallery was cold and, unsurprisingly, empty.
Having decided beforehand to spend that day working in Gallery Three (a tricky space to represent with its long-corridor like shape and wall of floor-to-ceiling windows) I spent an hour trying to capture Helen Yardley’s hanging rugs with their ‘dancing’ marks. I’d hoped to distract myself, only too aware of the panic that was beginning to bubble up inside of me. It was a hopeless business. I was cold, disconsolate and scared.
Caving in, I went to the desk. “I need people,” I said to Gareth or was it Paul (apparently visitors always mix them up too), “so I’m going to the café. ”
Warm, the Café R buzzed with life. It felt like another universe. Who were all these people, sitting down to their too-early Christmas parties? Was there ever any crossover? Bellies full, would they go and look around the Gallery afterwards?
Comfortable though it was, I was nevertheless unsettled. Should I be there or not? Was I betraying my intention? The project even? Could Café R legitimately be regarded as being part of RCC? It affected my drawing. I couldn’t focus.
In the end I decided just to draw – to, in effect, draw myself out of the hole that I’d begun to dig for myself. I’d wanted people and here they were. Like the man in the peaked cap and dark glasses who kept his coat on throughout, staring at, and mostly not drinking, his latte.
Or the man eating a huge beef burger, completely engrossed in its consumption.
Or the woman with black shiny beehive who came in with her mother.
I drew and drew. Sometimes calmed by the action of my hand, and for brief moments, lost in it. But I was bereft. It felt like a failure.
Returning to the Gallery to pack up my things, a man came in. Grabbing a pencil, I quickly drew him as he moved from rug to rug, looking at each one in turn, stepping in close and then stepping back. Eventually he came near to where I was sitting and smiled. “Wonderful, aren’t they?” he said.
Packed up and ready to go, I went for one last look at the rugs in Gallery One, conscious that it would be the last time I’d see them. An elderly couple came in. He wandered around, shopping bag in hand, while she sat on one of the benches. I grabbed my sketchbook and graphite pencil. It was enough.
The following day my visit to Oriel Davies couldn’t have been more different from either RCC the day before or, indeed, OD the month before. Here was energy, excitement and even, at certain times, something like joy.
The new show – a response to the National Gallery’s loan of Andrea del Verrocchio’s Tobias and the Angel – is a marvel. There is the ‘Angel’ itself of course and various other old Masters, such as a Rembrandt print, and some exquisite ceramics by artists such as Claire Curneen, Philip Eglin and Adam Buick (including his fabulous film).
There was so much to take in. I was made heady by it. The shiny black ‘altar’ at the far end of Gallery One, on top of which stood three of Curneen’s pieces (with another one hovering above it), took my breath away.
Determined to focus and concentrate on the job in hand however, I positioned myself opposite the Angel painting and waited for visitors. They soon came, and in a gloriously steady stream.
The first couple included an American woman who appeared, from what I could overhear, to be either a teacher or lecturer. They were in raptures.
The man was particularly entranced by the detail of the fishes, something he hadn’t noticed until accepting the offer of a magnifying glass.
Then there were the pair from Birmingham.
He did all the talking, while she, hanging back slightly, listened obediently.
An artist himself (or so he informed Deborah, who was there in the gallery throughout, tirelessly repeating the same information over and over), he was loquacious and, indeed, seemingly well-versed on the subject of Verrocchio, the painting and the Renaissance. (Deborah told me afterwards that he’d shown her a picture of a copy he’d made of – was it the Mona Lisa or The Birth of Venus? – adding, “And it was quite good.”)
I was captivated by them – his apparent dominance and her almost mute acquiescence and the interplay of their gestures and body language.
However, some visitors seemed more entranced by the other works.
The majority were men. I watched them come in through the sliding glass door, generally with rucksacks on their backs, and stand, arms folded in front of one piece or another.
I thought about how like a stage a gallery is, with its entrances and exits and the way in which the visitors (like actors), inhabit and behave in the space. From my experience so far, both in RCC and OD, visitors invariably race around galleries. It takes a lot to keep them still, static, rapt. Perhaps it’s about finding one’s comfort zone or something familiar and safe. The Angel seemed to do that for people, inviting a stillness and a kind of permission to get in close. But for many of the male visitors that I observed, it was the ceramics that really captivated them.
Such as the tall man who kept returning to bend over Beverley Bell-Hughes’ forms. Leaning right in, with a Tesco bag clutched in his hands behind him, he held his body at virtually a ninety-degree angle.
Though a relatively small space, particularly in comparison with RCC, I felt nicely invisible in OD. There was so much to entrance and attract those who came that me sitting there (even with all my paraphernalia spread out on the floor in front of me) didn’t seem to phase them at all. As a result my usual chronic self-consciousness dissipated and I drew continually, without stopping. It was both exhilarating and exhausting.
I was asked again that day what I intended to do with my sketches and whether they would be ‘worked-up’ into a bigger paintings.
I answered no, as I always do, but it did make me wonder what I intend to do with this project and the body of work it generates.
For me, certainly at the moment, the making of the drawings, that intuitive response to what is happening in front of me, is the work. The drawings themselves are almost a by-product. If they become anything more, might their spontaneity be lost? As I’ve written before, it all continues to be a bit of a hit and miss thing .
I wait for the magic, always. But it is rare. Sometimes, I feel it inside but fail to communicate it on the page.
For now all I can do is draw and draw and draw and then maybe, just maybe, that magic, that marvellous spark, will happen.