In Praise of Drawing

It starts with a line. I love the transformative magic as you build on a surface, and an image or form appears; how something complex and rich can grow out of a series of what are quite simple marks and actions. It is a physical thing, a dance across the surface of the paper, with rhythm and movement that comes through your body to respond to what you see and feel.  

In a world of concepts and clever ideas it sometimes feels old-fashioned to set out with a big book of blank pages, some pencils and a paint brush or two, to draw what you see. And then it feels weird to write about this process. A part of me is resistant to the need to use words to describe something that is not about words. But over the last few years it has become increasingly clear that this process and these drawings form a deep core of my practice. A vehicle to ground me and a way to engage physically in my place in the world, a preparatory understory. 

How do we make art in uncivilised times? For me this has to start with slowing down and paying attention. The single track roads I travel along every day admonish me to go SLOW painted in three-foot-high letters across the road before hidden dips and blind corners. It’s a good reminder. On the shore the waves and tide rush in and out, but they are also linked to the slower clocks of the planets. The rocks and the peat of the moor play out the deep slow bass line of our Hebridean landscape. So, slow, but also soft, can my drawing practice be an act of soft rebellion?  

Shannon Willis, an animist and ritualist, has written about ‘soft rebellion’ as:

…the mycelial strategy of weaving beneath the surface, unsettling rigid structures with slow, persistent entanglement… 

Soft rebellion moves through stories, through the slow embroidery of alternative worlds into the fabric of the present. It cultivates beauty in places of despair, weaving small sanctuaries of aliveness that offer refuge and reimagine what is possible. It disrupts through delight, through care, through humor that turns the blade of power back on itself. It does not fight on the battlefield chosen by the oppressor; it shifts the ground beneath their feet. 

If I pay attention, can I find the portals and the places where the world is thin, where the physical lines and marks on my page will weave stories that connect through time as well as space, and where I can ‘disrupt through delight’?  

Slow and soft but also there is something about quiet here too. There is space and need for shouting, big grand gestures with loud protests and anger, but also there needs to be space for quiet. Not a quiet that hides, but a quiet that just gets on with it, making, doing, resisting, building networks, making friends, weaving that mycelial connective network quietly and softly. Doing the things that make us human and bring us joy.  

I’ve been having a conversation with friends recently about these drawings. They are in sketchbooks, but not ‘a sketchbook’ in the way most people conceive of one; they are not preliminary studies for something else, they are their own thing. A root of my practice, and, for sure, they inform other work, but not often in a linear or direct way. They are not done to be torn out and framed for some exhibition or gallery; but neither are they private like a diary; the nature of being in a book holds them together hidden and waiting for the leaves to open and reveal them one at a time as you turn the pages. Does any of this matter? Not really. They are what they are: a set of quiet artist’s books of stories gathered over time of sitting with rocks, often in places that I return to time and again, out of the wind and softly and slowly looking and listening and learning, and just being.  

So here I am on this December afternoon, I have climbed from the shore to settle with the rock. I have carried seawater and some tokens in my pockets from the beach to the top of the hill and I have taken off my wellies and socks to allow the peaty sludge at the bottom of the muddy puddles of the watershed to ooze between my toes. Then I have walked back down with bare feet across the sphagnum moss which is still crunchy in places from last night’s frost to find this place to sit together with the rock and draw a story about two swans in the loch as well as the curlews on the salt marsh and the geese on the machair; the deer on the hill – six, seven  –  and then they are gone. And the seaweed, and the moss and lichen, and the old old rocks, and the peat that creeps under the sand on the beach from an older landscape, and the hard-won scars of the runrig ‘lazy beds’ that have nothing to do with laziness at all. The honeysuckle and rowan, as well as the people who lived in the Iron Age broch in the loch with the swans, and those before them who put up the standing stones on the hill. All these have been my companions in this place, this territory which I come back to again and again to draw because of how it all comes together in this small space, and how, when you stop and look for the signs, you will see that the land wears the clues of all of this and more.  

Dark Mountain: Issue 28

Our Autumn 2025 special issue on Uncivilised Art celebrates the work and practice of artists in a collapsing yet still beautiful world

 

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