Tasmania: the East Coast

This almost qualifies as a throwback, since a couple of months have gone by since I took a slow drive from Launceston, through the Fingal Valley, to St. Helens, then to Hobart, with two nights at Swansea on the way.

The things I love most about  holidays like this:

1. They are full of unstructured time. No schedule. Anything can happen! Having a few days of unstructured time is what, for me, best promotes creative thinking and new perspectives. Minimal routine, maximum productivity. Strange, perhaps, but true.

2. I'm alone. Bliss.

3. There is no plan. If the beach where I eat breakfast just begs to be walked along, I can spend the rest of the morning walking. If I meet someone on the beach, I can stay and talk as long as I like. No "sorry, gotta go, gotta be in blah place by blah o'clock". And without a fixed plan, it's as though my vision expands from something narrow and driven, to something wide and open, ready to involve and be involved in all the world:  newly flowering wattles,  the mutter of fishermen on the rocks,  the changing colours of the sea from shore to horizon, thinking about how aboriginal people would have lived in a place like this, the unusual number of motorbikes on the road, erosion, cloud formations, unemployment, rural lifestyles, family history, coffee, languages, shoreline geology.... .

4. Beauty. It is good, now and then, to be in a place where, at every turn there is gut-punching, heart-stopping, soul-soaring beauty. To participate in it, to resonate with it. To exercise that heart muscle that recognises and identifies with it. To be overwhelmed and swept away.

5. Remembering, These are places that are familiar to me from long ago. They are rich with memory and experience. I love travelling through unfamiliar places too, but this is a different kind of love.

6. Time to reflect, time to imagine, time to draw and write.

Here are some of the drawings from that drive:

The Ben Lomond Massif seen from the Fingal Valley. There were so many stunning views on this clear, cold day, but very few places where the road had sufficient shoulder space to pull over. 

Binalong Bay, just north of St. Helens. 

Granite rocks at Binalong Bay.

Swansea: the view from my window on a quiet, misty morning.

Some broken shells I picked up, walking along Beer Barrel Beach, a little south of St. Helens.

More broken shells, these I collected above the high tide mark in Swansea, some drawn there, others finished when I got to Hobart.






A short stop on the way south, for some breakfast and a bit of conversation.

At my sister's house, looking out of the window from my bed, first thing in the morning.

These are the drawings in my sketchbook from those few days. I'm glad you could join me!

not a sketch, not a drawing....

The sky is a deep blue today. The wind blows cool and steady from the south. There are spring sounds: a duck somewhere over near the lake, the chirp and giddy twitter of birds, kids squealing and yelling in the park.

When I sat by the river earlier in the day, the waves were dark blue, a deep cold dark blue and the boats tied to yellow buoys did not stay still.

Why am I suddenly inspired to write something here after an absence so long that these posts look like the work of a stranger? Because with some delight and exultation, I have rediscovered the phenomenon of 'the study'. Not the room full of books, but the drawing whose purpose is to look, observe, notice, explore, study a thing to understand it better, to become familiar with the way it is put together, its different angles, the way it occupies space. To learn it, not in the way of 'now I can draw faces' but in the spirit of recognising how jawlines change with age and how an eye sits in its socket and  brows can perch like hedges on the outcrops of the brows.

A study. Not a sketch. Here's the difference: a sketch is a (relatively) quick capture of the thing. A study is an exploration. Sometimes a dissection.

Because the boats moved around so much I worked fast, looking at how they changed shape as they moved. The result is not really a result. It is just the record of a learning process.

This is exciting to me because, for a long time, I have been uneasy with the way I feel about my sketchbooks. I don't want them to be nice, well composed, filled with 'great pages'. I don't want to think about my drawings in terms of how good they are or how satisfied I am that they capture something. Really what I want is for my sketchbooks to be full of activity, unselfconscious, dynamic, lively things in which beauty emerges in the way you see the beauty of a windswept face with wild and tangled hair, a song escaping from its lips, its eyes bright with adventure.