brianmchenry

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Another sketchbook reaches a permanent state of finished unfinishedness

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Scenes of remembered intimacy set against a backdrop of bucolic indifference

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‘And all of this happened’

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‘I’ve always felt that stories and pictures were a way of keeping people I knew alive and as they were, portraits for instance that show people young or middle aged long after they’re dead and keep them remembered long after they’re forgotten’.

Alasdair Gray

‘To begin at the beginning….’

Something loosely based on events that took place in Glasgow on the afternoon of June 3rd 1990.

‘The Big Day’ was a series of free concerts held across Glasgow to mark it’s year as European City of Culture.

Except it’s not really just about that at all, it never is…

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After Peter Seddon: Memories construct a different picture

In the 1980 the artist Peter Seddon created a series of large scale pastel drawings based on the Highland Clearances that explored themes such as history, memory and cultural difference.

These were included as part of the 1986 exhibition ‘As an Fhearann/ From the Land’ organised by An Lantair Gallery in Stornaway to mark the centenary of the Crofting Act. I visited the exhibition when it first came to Glasgow and it had a huge impact on not only my practice but also how I was to view the Highlands and Islands of Scotland that I would be living in for the next fifteen or so years of my life.

The following images and notes are the start of an attempt to explore the themes that I first came across in Peters work and to place them in a personal context.

Essie Stewart is playing the accordion again for Richard Burton'

The drawing takes it’s subject matter from Tim Neats’ book ‘The Summer Walkers’ about the pearl fishers and travelling families of Scotland.

‘Bill Travers is looking across the Firth of Lorne again’

There’s a point in the film ‘Ring of Bright Water’ when the main character first travels north and gets off the old Calmac bus to look across the Firth of Lorne towards Mull in the distance.

Of course the movie takes vast liberties with both the book and the story of Gavin Maxwell himself but somehow for me, with that scene it all gets forgotten.

Ben Buie, Sgur Dearg, Dùn da Ghàoithe are in front of him like incomplete notes, each a hesitant beginning to something that isn’t there anymore.

Each a grace note

and I am sitting there in Fishnish all those years later.

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I draw them to bring them back

A series of random notes and hastily written thoughts on:

I draw them to bring them back

'To begin at the beginning...'

A while ago I was sitting in a cafe listening to a song called ‘New Feeling’ by Talking Heads. I like the song and I particularly like the lyrics. They are by David Byrne. I like David Byrne’s lyrics. They often seem to be consciously simple and paired down but at the same time evoking feelings that are much more complex and for me much sadder. The particular lyrics that caught my ear are these:

‘I wish I could meet everyone, meet them all over again

bring them up to my room

meet them all over again

everyone’s up in my room’

It sounds like this in case you are interested:

I started to think about those lyrics a lot and I started to draw pictures based on the words. My thoughts returned to the people that I knew growing up in the mid-sized Scottish seaside town of Ayr.

This is a drawing of the mid-sized Scottish seaside town of Ayr, drawn by me sometime in the latter half of the twentieth century.

This is the first drawing I did for 'I draw them to bring them back' I really didn't like it, I wasn't really thinking about the composition at this point, which shows. Everything seemed cramped and claustrophobic which I think was more in keeping with the feelings that I got from the song but the drawing itself was starting to develop into something else by this point.

It was becoming less about 'everybody's up in my room' and more about loss and distance and remembering (my favourite themes).

I drew them again, giving everyone their needed distance and at some point decided that the finished image should be landscape to emphasize this.

I also started to think of the figures almost as a printed layer of remembering placed on the backdrop of my teenage room.

I thought about this a lot and did a drawing of my room as a teenager with the sunlight moving across it and me not being there.

The finished image (so far) looks like this, I’m not sure if it is to be honest. It has the same feeling of finished unfinishedness that my sketchbooks have and who am I to argue?

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Some drawings from September

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Psalmody #1

Psalmody #2

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There are things I cannot do anymore, things I cannot see

An attempt to strip away what I do and why I do it - whatever that is. I’ve spent so much time away from painting and drawing and consequently so much time trying to re-learn how to draw again and remember how I used to make marks and also the thinking that went alongside those marks. When I was younger I would paint and draw, layer upon layer of marks and paint - all scraped away and written over - like Seamus Heaney’s Digging but with far less skill and much more mess.

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‘What are we to do now that we are happy?’

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Some drawings from August

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A Modern House

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View from a window in Thousand Oaks, California in 1966

I’m a bit obsessed with the view from the window in Julius Schumann’s photo of Case Study House #28 by Buff & Hensman. Mind you I’m a bit obsessed about the house too.

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Some drawings from July

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Another sketchbook achieves state of finished unfinishedness

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The start of an ongoing imaginary Italian landscape

An ongoing imaginary Italian landscape with added screen distortion

An ongoing imaginary Italian landscape: house with trampoline and car

A bicycle and a swing in northern Italy

Additions to an imaginary Italian landscape

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You said that you heard a fox that night when she died, outside the window as you slept in her room and I imagined it turning away and walking across the fields and past time itself

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