The best gift I ever received as a child was a box of Faber Castell coloured pencil crayons from my father. It was a tin box and if you pressed the back corners the lid popped open to reveal a layer of crinkly tissue paper and 24 crayons each sharpened to perfection, laid out in a rainbow that gave me my first introduction to names like rose madder, cadmium yellow, burnt ochre, raw umber and burnt sienna… the last two long before I’d ever heard of the colours of Italian earth. They all had numbers and were faceted with sides of gold that alternated with the colour of the pencil. I know this because I still have the white one… least used… and kept because I read somewhere as a teenager that I should whiten the underside of my nails with a white crayon!
So why the digitally enhanced artwork on the left heading up a writer’s blog on drawing? Firstly it’s the cover of a book I co-authored with Louisa Sherman on Print-making at GCSE level and secondly because there’s been a lot of right and left brain talk recently and whether the digital world is stifling creativity. Most might say pencil and paper wins over digital but with technology so superb that can allow Richard Hamilton to produce this intense portrait of fellow artist Dieter Roth, then we have to concede that all is not lost.
As a former art teacher, pencil and paper are still for me the most direct form of story telling. That’s all any child is doing when they’re drawing. With those very first ‘head-foot’ representations, they’re telling: This is me with my large head and big smiling mouth with teeth and eyes, (probably no nose…) I don’t care about smell just yet. I’ve arms and lots of fingers (possibly even looking like overgrown tarantulas) because I’m a tactile being. I stand on my own legs (though probably still floating aimlessly on this page) because there’s nothing more important than just me— its just me, me, me, in this world… or possibly I might draw this random line here beneath my legs? Maybe after all I might be connected to something else in the world. And so the child tells the story of himself and what is important to him.
Cavemen knew something when they were drawing their stories. Not only did they use the cave walls as story boards but they turned story telling into a multi-sound-visual event with dance, music and drumming with firelight and the odd lightning bolt too, adding atmospheric lighting affects. True story-telling and showmanship! In fact they were far closer to the idea of visual story-telling as in film or video than a lot of civilizations who came after them.
I went back to my notebooks at random to see if I was trying to tell a story while I drew. Unfortunately I didn’t find any of my really early ‘head-feet’ representations but I found a conte crayon self-portrait done a few weeks before my twentieth birthday and some others from more recent notebooks.
The one above with the giraffe became the basis for a picture book story called Zeraffa. The date on the page in this notebook is 1999. The book will coming out in 2013. Shows how long some stories take to infuse and become print! But from the notebooks I discovered why I’m a writer rather than an illustrator. I’m an observer. And observation stifles the way I want the story to grow and become ‘more’ than what I see. It seems easier to evoke this magic with words. That doesn’t mean to say that I won’t be sitting with scissors and coloured paper like Matisse one day and be telling stories of snails and blue dancing ladies when I’m ancient and can’t see too well.
So where is this blog meandering? Do you draw? is the question I began with and how I’ll end. Matisse has been quoted as saying later in life when he took up paper collage…
Freedom is really the impossibility of following the same road as everybody else: freedom means taking the path your talents make you take.
So whether you draw with words, or with Faber Castell crayons, or through the lens of a camera, or through digital wizardry, its still story and as long as you do, that’s all that matters…. because if we lose the power to use our imagination and to create story we’ll lose what it means to be human. So let’s use all we’ve got… bells and whistles, drums and dance.
Flies in the buttermilk. A creamy animal stippled with small black dots that resemble flies swimming in a bucket of buttermilk. 
Soured milk. A cloudy mix of grey and cream and dun that resembles milk just beginning to clot and cloud and turn. 
Zebra, or it’s Zulu name Idube, one of the rarest patterns of all Nguni and strangely never black and white like a true zebra but brindled and striped, dark reddish brown with streaks of black.
Names are inpsired by nature. A pure black beast is associated with thunderclouds and used to beg the spirits for rain. A creamy dun coloured animal might be Soured milk or The beast who holds the mushroom or Sand of the sea. A dark animal with a flash of red-brown is The Red-winged Starling. An animal with a dark top half and flecked hind quarters is The Martial Eagle. 
A pale animal with brown speckles is Egg of the lark or Seed of the Castor oil plant. An animal flecked with dark smudges is Caterpillars of the marula tree. A black beast with a white stripe down its throat is Beast which is part of the mimosa bark peeled back. There are humourous names too – The beast which is the woman crossing over, a dark animal with solid white on its underbelly that suggests a woman walking through a river holding up her skirt, and Beast whose thighs are like those of a lady. Irony comes through in the praises of Cetshwayo where the disparaging name Small red spotted calf of the whites is given to a British Officer at the Battle of Isandlwana. 
Hopkins with his double Firsts at Oxford, his friendship with Robert Bridges, his appointment as Professor of Greek and Latin in University College Dublin, would have had a distinct advantage over a young 19th century herdsman. But in discussing poetry Hopkins uses two terms: inscape and instress. By inscape he means the unified complex of characteristics that give each thing its uniqueness and that differentiate it from other things, and by instress he means the impulse from the inscape which carries it whole into the mind of the beholder.
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It was the sight of the zucchini fiori that got me started… those furled globes waiting to be filled with ricotta and basil. Somewhere in the 70’s Shirley Conran wrote in Superwoman that life’s too short to stuff a mushroom. Well life’s too short, NOT to stuff a zucchini fiori and dip it in egg and Japanese breadcrumbs and fry till golden. And then there are the heaps of different sized and shaped tomatoes… some for roasting, some for salad, some for gazpacho… that fill my basket because we all know the same tomato can’t be used for everything!
