I Live Here Now

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Prints of one of these bandstand drawings are being sold in the café on the street below, where his father’s bakery once stood, to fund a campaign to save the circus from being dug up and “re-landscaped” by the local council. The woman in the Ukraine flat in early spring, the start of the war, playing out to spite the devastation, and Masha’s father this autumn in Moscow, his children and grandchildren gone, bent over his long dreamed of piano, playing on as his city becomes ever more unreachable. The woman in the basement had made a stand and left the group, after posting an eloquent speech of disassociation. Because I kept my eyes on the world, essential for safety and avoidance of oncoming objects (small wayward dogs a particular hazard), I couldn’t look at my paper as I drew, so the drawings were blind drawings with the occasional quick glance down at the drawing to see what was happening.

When I taped them to the wall in the spring, they seemed somehow to fit the awful circumstances in which they were now situated.There is a large kite with tassels and a small girl running with a much smaller kite that rises up after her as she runs with its string. I am educating myself on the difference between the PCR and RAT that may or may not be demanded of me, according to the law next month. Slowly they disperse and I sit back on a bench and watch a small child’s face appear and vanish repeatedly along the line of tall windows in the Victorian school as they pull the blinds shut.

On Sunday afternoon I stood on the street, looking down through a gap between buildings and watched the train with the last of my visitors inside it cross the bridge over the Clyde and set off towards London. I sit and follow the stirring of the tree, the kite, the hat of the girl — going up and back, and repeating again like a swing.I swim with my nose at the level of the water, perfectly held between the air and the underwater, my eyes fixed on the island before me that is transformed, transcendent — the real world before me holding within it the dream, the idyll of the painting. She has had solo exhibitions of texts and images at Siobhan Davies Studios, the Royal Drawing School, London and Art Jericho, Oxford and curated a dance and live drawing performance within an installation of her drawings at Selfridges window space, London. On our last night it was the “rambling session”, a walk while playing, up the long road out of the village. Instead I take cues from my surroundings; slowing to the rhythm of light, air and sound, trying to establish where I am in space through the echoes in the back court: the burr of wood pigeons and the soft melodic cough of the man in the flat below. They descended at a diagonal, crossed the bridge and merged with the people waiting on the other side.

A few people walk across the circus and every few hours there is a burst of noise and cheer from children playing in the school ground across the road. The coloured pencils I’d been using didn’t capture that sense of gathering twilight and I switched to black artgraf (a solid block of ink), as I was keen to explore its expressive qualities.The economy is described as “in hibernation”, a sort of deep freeze, from which it should emerge as fresh as peas. And I stayed there under the speaker, waving as they weaved back and forth along the lines of barriers, waving back, all the way to security, and vanished from sight. This long gone family home was the last place where we could be together casually, at ease in the shared space.