“That’s no lady, that’s the drawinglady”

Hello, I’m Rachel. I’m a lady and I draw: I’m the drawinglady. I paint, too, and can rejuvenate discarded everyday objects into things of shimmering beauty. (My friend Simon who set the site up for me wrote this, I rather like it, so I’ve kept it) (but I’m not Lady Rachel).  This is about me and my art, which is drawing, making marks on paper: the sound of the pen or pencil creating the marks; the rhythmic strokes; scratches and scrapes; the voluptuous swoosh and the deliberate l.i.n.e. It’s about the mark, the feel of the mark and the sound of the mark. My work is also about exploring through drawing; it is about looking and seeing.  Just as a blind woman needs to feel something to ‘see’ and ‘know’ it, I need to draw objects to ‘know’ them.  My work is almost always influenced by Nature. I do not want to reproduce the world around me. Nor do I want to paint abstract landscapes. But I do want to put down what I feel. I try to draw the things I like in a way that reflects both what I like about those things and how I see them. Everything I draw is a part of me. It is part of my memory, it is all within me, but it has all been digested, mulled over, forgotten and then remembered again. I draw what I think of as the drawings in nature: the infinite variety of strokes, dashes and lines that is the grass in a field or on a hillside, crushed, eaten and worn in so many different directions; alien plastic silage bales randomly scattered over the fields, ditto herds of cows and sheep; stumpy old pollarded willow trees regimented along the banks of Somerset rhines and droves. How to translate this infinite variety of marks and patterns in the landscape into ‘marks on paper’. The reduction of form and life to very singular marks on a page.

Making marks on paper creates spaces:  Robert Motherwell said ”….. drawing is essentially a division of space”.  Around each of the marks is a space, this space defines the marks, makes them marks. The marks delineate the spaces. So the spaces are as important as the marks/non-spaces.  Marks on paper are very interesting.  Drawing for me is the process; it is the physicality of the mark making.  I choose the ground, I choose the implement, I choose where on the ground, I choose the strength, I choose the thickness, I choose the length.  I make the mark – I feel the mark being made.  Making the marks – repeating and repeating them is important to me. Like a bhuddist chanting or walking all those steps: I do them ‘until it is enough” (thank you Mrs Beeton), the marks centre me and focus me. I like marks.