Research Town

Re-visiting and re-invigorating a dormant practice

I re-visited my drawing practice during and in-between the lockdowns in the UK during the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic. Finding a need for an outlet at the time for the challenges we faced, collectively and individually, I turned to drawing. I made sketches about time spent with my son on a given day, sometimes joyful, sometimes tense and difficult (fig 1.). He was 3 years old at the start of the pandemic in 2020. We walked the same path, which we called ‘the fairy bridges’ every day for so many days that he only recently agreed to go on the walk again this summer. It was around this time that I decided to make a new Instagram account just for drawing, @louisapreston_scribo.

Early posts I made coincided with a short online course I enrolled on for illustration. Having trained in Fine Art, my previous drawing had focused on the observational, striving for accuracy in the representation of the object under scrutiny. The drawing I was encouraged to pursue on this course was the opposite, derived from the imaginary, focused on the fictional but inspired by the factual and experiential aspects of life. The first drawing I made however was an observational drawing of the tools I had available for my future drawing endeavours. This collection of mark making tools included some pens I had not seen since my art school days (fig 2.).

I soon began to venture however, into the drawing in a different way, to capture a moment, or series of moments from a self-portrait point of view.

Be Brave (fig 3), became a post on my Instagram feed to share a connection I made with braving the exercise events we had to complete at my local gym, as part of a Christmas charity challenge. This was really about acknowledging that we need bravery for the small things in our life – like doing a gym workout challenge, but which add up to big things – like lasting long term health impacts for the better because of those smaller actions. I suppose I was trying to connect the challenges that we faced at the time collectively, of the Covid-19 pandemic and the lockdowns that year, to something that I could relate to more solidly in my experience.

Lastly, a short story book club that two of my friends and I decided to do in January 2021, mainly to cheer ourselves up, inspired drawings that pictured the story we were talking about at the time, The Distance of the Moon by Italo Calvino (fig. 4). This was the third short story that we discussed on Zoom with wine as a way to escape the daily grind of work in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic lockdowns and restrictions. I was inspired by the idea that one could sail out to sea at a particular time of night when the moon was close enough to climb a ladder to reach it, where the protagonists of the story collect “moon-milk.”