Finding My Inner Caveperson
Sunday September 7, 2008
We have just moved house, and my new home has a small wood-fired heater. It's a wonderful thing, gathering twigs and old pinecones from beneath our own trees for kindling. My fire-making skills are a bit dodgy, and yesterday morning I woke to find the log I'd left burning had turned into charcoal! So of course I had to test out its drawing properties! It turned out to be way too hard for drawing on paper, but it worked brilliantly on the courtyard bricks. My daughter decided to try to make paint, and discovered that soaking the charcoal in water allowed it to create a thick, dense coating. We spent a wonderful hour decorating the bricks, firstly with zig-zag paving patterns, then they evolved into sunbursts and curves, circles and squiggles punctuated with stripes and dots. They began confined within the each pair of bricks then gradually expanded across them. And what a mess we made! Hands covered in black! Fantastic!
I haven't had so much fun drawing in ages. I found myself wondering about my stone-age ancestors and whether those moms might have spontaneously made marks with their children. Did one of them draw a rayed sun like we had? It reminded me of how important it is to get back to the basics of drawing. It was the sort of drawing I used to do a lot of - instinctive, hands-on, messy and physical. None of this tidy A4 sketching for the scanner. How did you 'used to' draw? Have you left it behind for the drawing you 'need' to do?
Comments
Helen, where are the pictures! we want to see these “cave drawings”!
Some time ago I made paint with ochre (a piece of the actual rock, collected in a country walk) and egg yolk.
The result was a course and grainy paste, a hue not entirely unlike ochre
But I had a lot of fun, and so did my kids, griding the pieces of rock in a mortar, mixing the resulting “pigment” with the yolk, and doing small paintings in recycled pieces of corrugated card.
Charcoal is a great idea, so next time we’ll have two colours on our “natural” pallette.
What a lovely memory your daughter will have! When I was a kid, I would chew on the edge of my popsicle stick, until it worked like a crude brush. Then I would dip it into a cup of water and draw on an expanse of smooth concrete sidewalk by the back door of our house. The popsicle stick and the afternoon wore away slowly and with great pleasure.
I’ll have to find out how to get them off my phone, Starr! I did take a couple. I’ve found the camera, but not the battery charger….
I’m so glad I’ve got the opportunity to do these hands-on things with the kids. Much more difficult in a sterile urban environment. I love your popsicle stick story, Beth.
I used to dig up clay out of our pasture when I was growing up and using it to paint on our sidewalk between the house and the barn. My mom wasn’t impressed, but she did let me keep doing them. I think my dad, a painter, made her.