To art (art is a verb after all not a noun) is as much to cycle or walk meditatively (with a vague outline of the way ahead) as it is to draw or to sketch. Both are deeply meditative enterprises which do you the world of good. I have only recently discovered the joys of drawing, having come to it by my own hand so to speak and by the inspiration of certain others. Two books this year that reinforced my feeling towards drawing were Tim Ingold's Being Alive in which he looks at drawing as a type of wayfaring and Andrew Marr's A Short Book About Drawing which contained some very decent sketches and some equally decent text.
I also came across another Glaswegian drawer, Muirhead Bone, whose drypoint sketches of fin de siecle Glasgow are something else. And so, I decided that I should at least try to sketch or draw.... as a way not only of wayfaring and finding my own way into something, but of contemplating more deeply the reality that had caused me to sketch it in the first place. Previously, it had been text and my writings that had helped express this deep reality, but now, maybe it's age, I find the image, and colour, more evocative... for the moment. Indeed, I am putting together an emblem book of both: sketches and text, which might collude to evoke the strength of this reality. This is what I enjoyed about Marr's book, the conjoing of the two media. But the emblem book from its heyday in the 16th century, or the vade mecum pocket prayer book from earlier on, has lost its value beneath all the commerical crap out there. There's something loving about an emblem book though, of which there is only one original version, hand-made, lovingly put together without a care for profit or money or commerce. It is born out of love, out of sheer spontaneity, and the vital force that lives within the meditative cyclist. The book is an outpouring - an overflow - of all the beauty that the cyclist has collected along the way....
And so here, a few sketches with bicycle....
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