ellen bell

I’m trying to find my language again. It’s almost like re-learning to speak, to write. There is no right way, or right line but I know when it is – right for me, that is. I do get disheartened. I wait for the click (it’s the same when I right, or make work). It’s rare but marvellous when it comes. It was hard going on the Prom, everything is in motion. And my brain tells me I can’t do it. I am finding it hard to write and draw, the drawing or my need to get it right dominates. There’s that right again. I know what I mean. This scanning of them helps, I get outside of them and can survey with less judgement.

I noticed so many things that I didn’t capture – like the couple (he with a very large head) washing their feet after being on the sand at the public shower by the bandstand. He had rolled up his shorts. She wore a mohair cardigan. They both had dyed their hair, her’s was red and his brown. She fussed and he attended to her.

I dreamt of crocuses pushing through the soil and thought but it isn’t even September.

Yesterday was my drawing day in the Museum. I didn’t hold out much hope for much to study, and I wasn’t far wrong. A bloke stood at the bottom of the stairs asking for names and proof of booking. Ah, will spontaneity ever return? The admittance was limited, as were the rooms that were open – just the one floor. We are trailed behind each other, masks on (which doesn’t aid the study of faces) – umming and ahing over the exhibits that I’ve seen countless times. And it is so dark in there. I did draw – such as the petulant girl who kept slumping down on chairs, evidently determined to show how bored she was, and there was the little boy too, all tousle-headed with his Dad. I heard his voice echoing through the hall (somehow they had managed to get upstairs).

He was in the café across the street while I drew, ‘happy as Larry’ with his paper and coffee. I joined him eventually and drew in there. I’d spent the morning copying intentionally, trying to learn from Ronald Searle’s mark-making. It helped, I think. I drew with more speed, trying to just keep going and not judge. One step forward and umpteen back.

There was an L-plate on the pavement outside the corner shop. And packs of kids seemed to roam the streets (since the clubs have opened), three girls arm-in-arm first and then a hoard of them spilling out into the road.

The Arts Centre was empty, well virtually. I had had to book online to view the exhibition (presumably to keep the hoards from contravening the now wobbly social distancing laws) and yet there were just four of us in there (soon diminishing to just two). So I followed them around. It was awkward. And the awkwardness made my pen slow and my brain even slower. I will have to surmount this somehow, for there will be long periods of seemingly nothing happening in the galleries I aim to study too. I know this, I’ve been there (willingly) when they were both empty. This particular woman whom I followed appeared quite demanding, she asked things of the gallery adjudicator and then later of the waitresses serving in the café. She’d come in with her husband (he, sporting a very dapper red and white gingham shirt) but he had left her to it. She looked at every piece, slowly and deliberately, her hands clasped behind her back. Her grey linen coat/dress was amorphous and floaty and her hair wild and fluffed out, which made drawing her challenging, there being no defined lines. A tall, neatly-clipped man had been in there before her. He wore trainers too and spic and span jeans, ironed and crisp. He also gave the exhibit (an open-call to the public to submit art inspired or produced during lock-down) its due. I found it grey and depressing. I struggle to look at such a hotchpotch, though I celebrate the intention. And it was cold in there, it often is. I drew from the balcony afterwards, watching the people sitting at tables in the café. I saw at least three women wearing dungarees, two of whom were pregnant. Walking home it was as if my eyes had been opened-wider, I saw colours (such as an azure blue stripe on man-hole cover) with increased intensity.

I dreamt I was travelling and sitting down on a pavement I began talking to some people who asked where I was going. I told them I couldn’t decide which friends to visit – and that I had one in Zurich. And they told me that Zurich was just down the road. They watched me take out a small plastic bag with a tiny doll that I had made to give to my friends (though I knew that I’d already given them one). I saw their fascination and heard their praise. Then the alarm went off.

Drawing Day 3 – I tried to reign in my fear and breathe and perhaps allow that with all the movement and going back and forth of visitors (I’d placed myself just outside the station) I would only be able to capture details, and that that would be OK. Scanning the drawings helps. I like to zoom in on the line and see the gestural nature of it. And it imposes a healthy detachment, enabling me to see it as apart from myself. What do they communicate?- that is the important thing, not whether they are good or not. He was at the entrance to Tree House, and clearly working there. A couple stopped him to talk. I saw so many people wearing masks somewhat half-heartedly, mostly under the chin. I think that a lot of people forget that they are there. There is something there, something I can work with, isn’t there? It’s the Arts Centre today with all that palaver about booking a slot. Will spontaneity ever return?

I was exhausted by the end of it, and I didn’t draw for long. It was the wind, the cold, the frenetic movement of the Prom and the fact that I’d wrestled with the first draft of my proposal all morning. I know, it isn’t the same as going down the pit or worse, fleeing the Taliban in Afghanistan, but for me with my little brain it was hard enough. I’m trying to re-learn something I could do before, though never really well. It’s a language yes, but mostly it’s about putting self-consciousness to one side and just reacting. I want it to come. To be in that zone of eye to hand responsiveness. Can I make it come? If I do it enough, will it come? And then there are the decisions one makes in the midst of it. Should I write or draw or do both? And how to organise or place them on the page? How to communicate best what I see, hear and feel? Isn’t that ever the way in the creative process? A world of how tos.

We have returned to Middlemarch.

I struggle with the thoughts inside my head, for they are not mine. All those judgements, barbs and fault-findings, they run counter to my need, no my absolute requirement to be kind. As I said they are not my thoughts, they are borrowed, handed-down. He spoke well, that Somalian barrister. He articulated my struggles so much so that I he got under my skin. I am a representative of all of those he described – the privileged, the middle-class and the fortunate. I have had all that I have needed to get on in life – though I suspect my parents would say (if they were still living) that I haven’t made the best of it. My conscience is strong. I want to change. I want to embrace all the self-awareness that he was promulgating. A good man, I think.

I dreamt, no doubt of a consequence of what I had listened to, that I had an Asian lover. He was kind, but I was very aware of how we were perceived by the world. At one point he was celebrating my achievements (what they were I’m not certain) over a loud-hailer. It was convoluted dream featuring 70 year-old women becoming pregnant (I worried that I might too), another woman arguing over some books and me packing and unpacking (he and I were always on the move).

I hold my breath for them, all of them. I wish there was something that we could do. Be there with them. Make it alright. Please.

They are not good drawings but I need to see them, separate from myself. And it isn’t really about whether they are good or not. This isn’t a drawing exercise but a way of capturing, of recording what I saw. I need to get over this restrictive judgement, it gets in the way of my looking. So I shall keep going until I come through to the other side of ego-less-ness.

I had to pee in the wilderness the other day and I found another piece of blue and white. I think it is old, perhaps 1920s at the most. The clay is think, and the blue and white stripe is painted and thick. It give me joy to find such things.

There was a butterfly on one of the picture frames in my bedroom. He thought it was a Painted Lady. He helped it outside and we watched it fly off. And then yesterday morning I found a grasshopper on the kitchen floor. We are three floors up – so lord alone knows how he got up there. He was an almost white-green. And then this morning as I cleaned (in the still dark) a moth fluttered at the window. That membrane between the outer and the inner is a fine one.

I think I have remembered what he was saying as I passed them. They were arm in arm, young and intense. He was talking, she listening. I don’t want to hear what’s been going on,’ he said.

She gave us the nodding dog song, he said at breakfast.

There’s a mystery surrounding her death. Too early. She didn’t want any press till a week after. I love her voice. And her stories….. Rest in peace.

My laptop is getting old and slow, like me. I wanted to write about drawing yesterday but my patience is ragged waiting for her to respond. Oh well. I did it. I tried. And the results are as expected, self-conscious and tentative. There is no way round it, I have to do more and often. Every day if possible. I know when I am not seeing properly. It’s a simple equation – look and draw. That’s all. Look intensely and the lines will follow. I was tired at the end of it and the tea had made me nauseous. He read the paper and kept me company. My love.

She had always been there. And as a child and as a woman I loved seeing her. There was always this aura of kindness to her, an openness, an open-eyed, warm-hearted interest in others. Or perhaps I am projecting all this onto her memory. Though I did meet her, several times. She was in one of the plays at the Royal Exchange when I was there working FOH. And she was just as I thought she would be. Lovely. I am sorry she has gone. Rest in peace, Una Stubbs.

She held my hand fast. She has small hands and she clung to mine. I let it be. I like to touch her. And I suspect she is lonely. She talks about low mornings. And I can imagine them. She responds to company. She comes alive. Her eyes though are sad. Deep down they look lost. They are elsewhere. That is her grief. We all have it. Or at least, if not now, we will do. Some sooner than others.

The smell was a shock. I thought it was him. Your cursed sense of smell, he’d say. Yes, I often don’t want it. It’s too intimate. And I pick up those transgressions that even that lovely, feminine gentle tiny woman lets loose.

Drawing today. Are you excited? he asked.

No. Scared. I am not brave.

He ordered two one for her and one for himself. She was delighted with it. It was so good to see her. Her energy and sparkle are charming. She sat in that huge chair and talked and ate and let her tea go cold. I bombarded her with questions as usual and we both listened, loving just being there, with her, with them both. It was a day out, the first in a long long time and I was edgy at the start. A stepping-out of my oh so rigid routine is a challenge for me. We got there early, too early but we didn’t mind. We did crosswords, I drank tea, he coffee and when he left to go and collect her I drew. We sat downstairs on one of those lovely Scandinavian design sofas and I watched a fly flitting from cake to milk jug to edge of teacup while he read out the clues. Then she came and it was all about children, sisters, mummies (even in her late eighties she calls her mother ‘mummy’) and silver coal scuttles. (This threw us for a time – what could she mean? especially when she said she remembered it being on her grandfather’s table as a child – all became clear when she explained that it was a facsimile of one and functions as a sugar bowl, with the obligatory tongs. ) A lovely day but it tired me out. Why? The journey (4 hours) or that stepping-out into something new and un-prescribed, who knows?

I’ve made a start on the proposal – well, visually at least. And we talked about it in the car. I’m trying to make it real. Can I do it? I still ask.