Project 1: A changing scene

My office at home is on the third floor of the house so I often get distracted by birds on the roof tops below. I decided to try to sketch them in flight to work out what I could see and how to show the movements that they were making.

My first ideas revolved around repetition – trying to draw the way that the bird’s wings moved – but in reality these movements were too fast to capture. Instead I started to think about using a different media to give a sense of the action of the wings rather than trying to draw everything.

Using ink and a collection of different tools, I next played around with the way I could make marks that suggested the bird was in flight. As I drew I realised that the images were becoming more and more abstract so that the focus of them changed from the shape of the bird to just the movement it was making. This felt more successful than my previous attempts.

I also have a great view of the Orwell Bridge from up here. Because of the barriers either side I can’t really make out smaller vehicles like cars but I can see lots of lorries heading for the port. I drew this series on a rainy, overcast day, again trying to capture the sense of movement rather than any accurate representation of the scene. I like the spontaneity of these drawings, the movement of the ink reflects the speed of the passing vehicles and the smudginess of the marks replicate my blurry view of the bridge on the day.

I was enjoying this way of working and the different results I was achieving with ink, so after my bike ride the next day I tried to draw some of the things I remembered riding past. I wondered whether making myself the moving object would change the outcome of my drawings. I was also interested in the fact that these had to be drawn from memory and how this way of approaching the work would differ to my previous attempts to capture movement.

Both drawings below are from my bike ride in the park – the first is of the long grass that runs alongside the footpath and the second is the river with rain drops falling into it. Again these are quite abstract but there’s something I like about them. I think it relates to the small fragments of information that they ‘give up’ to the viewer. It seems just enough to give a clue as to what the images are about without ever really telling them.

There is also a link to my work on memory and how we sometimes think that we remember something well, when in reality we often just recall a small moment of the event which we then fill in with details later so that it feels complete. The way in which I saw the environment around me while cycling was similar. I saw in small glimpses; parts of objects, scraps of this and that which were recognisable, but because I was moving at speed the majority was a blur.

Overall, I was happier once I moved away from my preconceptions about what this exercise was asking for. I think I’ve come up with a few drawings that have the potential to lead into another way of working, so from a technical perspective this has been a useful task. I still feel more interested in the experimental stage of drawing than in the idea of producing one final piece, and the different marks I was able to make with the ink and tools are what really captured my imagination.