Making art in lockdown
Spending lockdown hiding in the woods
In this heartbreakingly beautiful spring 2020, my walks to the woods on Shotover Hill have been a lifeline.
So many threads that hold our lives together are frayed now, or broken. As a self-employed artist, normally making my living from teaching art in the studio and sales of paintings, to say it’s a stressful time is an understatement. So many changes to the fabric of life to process, for all of us.
But, completely hidden in the woods, well off the beaten track and with only the birds for company, I’ve been drawing and painting.
It’s nothing to do with feeling inspired or motivated. Needing to feel ‘inspired’ first is a barrier to making art. It’s not necessary. It already sets the bar too high. Even if I am feeling knocked for six by it all, if I can make a start, a mark, and then another, something starts to happen.
Ella Clocksin (2020) dawn chorus notations, sketchbook
Getting absorbed in the deliberate and subliminal decisions in painting can be a way of stilling my mind from the losses and uncertainties of the wider situation. Some days, I can’t fully evade the dread at the edge of my mind. It’s not a glib fix, nor a perfect one.
“Make your work your best friend.”
But other days, I become more involved in the painting. And it has much in common with mindfulness practice. It always did, but I’m more aware now of the connections between the two after a course at the Oxford Mindfulness Centre a few years ago.
It means noticing, moment by moment, what’s in my field of vision and hearing, and responding on the paper in watercolour, pencil, crayon and gouache. It’s not synaesthesia. It’s more like when we dance. We hear the music, respond to it and move.
I’ve long worked from observation to abstraction, so I’m used to processing what I see into more abstract compositions. But this current work also transcribes the abstract rhythms and the musical undulations of birds singing in the woods.
Ella Clocksin (2020) Birdsong Perceptual Field 7, water-based mixed media
These paintings might include trees, branches, or tangled undergrowth. But I’m also making notations of what I’m hearing. So some lines and shapes mimic, as closely as I can, the visual shape or pattern of birdsong.
I can’t identify many birdsongs. But I hear their call and response to each other across the woods. The bludgeon cries of alarm. The thin, falling keen of a red kite. A blurred murmuring. A sharp, clear staccato. The two-note chiffchaff. Ribbons of sound. And the baroque ornamentations of a blackbird in full song.
Ella Clocksin (2020) Blackbird 1, water-based mixed media
The artist Maggi Hambling said that making friends with our work — the practice of painting — is the best advice she ever received. It becomes something we can go to, or be with, even when we’re not feeling up to much. A place where we don’t need pretence. Nor performance or achievement. But just to be honest and real.
I’m testing this idea to destruction right now, and finding the ways it both is and isn’t true. It’s no substitute for live human contact. But it is helping me get through this.
Noticing something striking or beautiful gives moments of respite from the sometimes overwhelming stresses of the current time. As can gazing at an artwork that draws you in to a different space.
Art can’t change the world.
But it can help us navigate life’s deeper waters.
Normally in May, I transform my Headington studio into a gallery for a large exhibition of paintings, during Oxfordshire Artweeks.
But this year, I’m exhibiting online instead, during Artweeks, from Saturday 2 May to 25 May. And you can see more in the Birdsong Perceptual Field series here.
And once we’re into May, I will begin planning and devising online art classes with the usual mix of creative exercises, input and feedback. Watch this space for lockdown creativity, absorption and getting through this together.