Tumbling Through Broad Spaces

What it feels like to draw and paint, when you don't know how to.

Perhaps, I’ll draw, I thought.

I’d woken up that morning from a blast of bird squawks, as I tend to do on the weekend when the kids are not home. My flat sits at the tree canopy level, which means that the parakeets, orioles and koels which alight on the palm trees outside my window sound as loud as an alarm.

I thought about the birds; imagining them in their pastel greens and bright banana yellows and polished blacks. I get a pretty fancy selection of wild birds for a flat-dweller in urban Singapore.

I’m not sure if these early-morning ruminations caused me to suddenly remember, a few hours later, a picture of a bird that a friend had drawn. Yellow, I think it had been. Coloured in with colour pencil? Watercolour?

I am not someone who draws, myself. I do it perfunctorily to amuse my children, but at forty, I still draw like how I used to, thirty years ago. Trees with curly cloud-like tops. Houses with triangle roofs. Apples with single-line stalks disappearing into little smiles for dents.

So I’m not sure how I arrived so suddenly at perhaps, I’ll draw, in the marked absence of any particular proficiency, or interest. In fact, the thought that arrived this Saturday morning was so whimsical and untethered that I knew the perhaps would become a never if I didn’t immediately propel myself towards a 2B pencil, an eraser, and a blank sheet of paper. I glanced at the clock, and noticed that I had some time before lunch.

Fifteen minutes later, I looked up from my simple and—quelle surprise!—not unrealistic drawing of a small potted plant and realised that I was light-headed; not from joy, but from barely breathing during the sketching process. I had also possibly triggered the onset of tendonitis in at least fifteen different locations by holding my body in extreme tension. After all, how is one to sketch a leaf, except by tightly clenching one's toes, et cetera?

I’d fallen into a strange rabbit hole of some kind. My impulsive attempt to sketch a randomly selected household object had, against all expectation, felt as exhilarating and treacherous as a rope-walk between two precipices. Even curiouser: I’d fallen in some kind of love with my modest little potted plant in the process. For those fifteen minutes, I’d tremulously followed every curve of its outline; observed how its veins spread open under its skin; noted how one translucent colour blushed into the next. A new intimacy had emerged between us, pulled to the surface by my desperate gaze. No matter that it was just a fledgling plant minding its own business.

I mused upon my experience while I cooked lunch. Perhaps, I’ll colour the next one.

I am also not someone who paints. Once again, in order to avoid losing all impetus, I went out two days later and bought myself a nice paintbrush, four tubes of watercolour paint, and a small sketchbook.

By this time, my sketching experiment had taken on new parameters. I had decided that I would resist the knee-jerk temptation to search the internet for tips on how to draw or paint, and be guided by common sense. Just see what happens.

The first time I sat down with my paints and a little dish of water, I felt unmoored. I floundered, mixing yellow and blue to obtain Very Wrong Green. (Turns out, Right Green requires much more blue than I thought it did.) Sometimes, I added too little water, and sometimes I added too much. Often, I added too much black. I watched the paint bleed across my page with a life of its own. I discovered that watercolour wishes to be controlled, but is also gently defiant.

Not knowing how to do something is unsettling, and also invigorating. Having no idea how to draw or paint with any kind of proper technique has proffered me an open-endedness which thrusts me right back into childhood—where I am now suddenly tumbling out my front door and running barefoot on sharp grass; now shimmying up a tree; now poking an odd little bug with a twig. Little discoveries and adventures rushing in to fill the broad spaces which open up when there is nobody to tell me what to do next.

It feels like freedom the way I remember it.

I am (for now) uninterested in learning how to draw or paint properly. If that sounds a touch defensive, perhaps it is. Admitting that one might be perfectly content to remain mediocre at such-and-such, feels akin to moral failure, nowadays. No matter if such-and-such is as innocuous an activity as painting, or playing a musical instrument, or embroidering a cushion. If anything, a hobby has become something we are expected to seriously pursue with grave ambition; yet another thing that we must prove ourselves to be excellent at, according to some set schedule.

When in fact, there are unlimited ways to be engaged with a particular activity, because there are unlimited questions which beg for answers. Instead of driving forwards in organized fashion with some kind of finish line in mind, I often prefer to wander around meanderingly—admittedly, sometimes in endless circles—guided by curiosity. Stopping to pick up and examine whatever new thing I have just tripped over. Riding the ebbs and flows—and twists and turns—of motivation and ambition.

In this case, obtaining quick proficiency with a pencil or brush seems entirely beside the point, and possibly counterproductive to the sheer pleasure of being able to see what happens when I’m left alone with a plate of squished dumplings and some watercolour paint.

Whilst in the Muses’ paths I stray,
Whilst in their groves, and by their secret springs
My hand delights to trace unusual things,
And deviates from the known and common way;
Nor will in fading silks compose
Faintly th’ inimitable rose
- From “The Spleen”, by Anne Finch