Sarah’s Hug
I found a hug inside a box and decorated it for a friend, then I decorated some more and sent them to family and friends.
In the process of creating these ‘hugs’ I drew...emotions then I covered the emotions in the hug by drawing over those with new emotions and it was fine. I didn’t mind.
As I was creating one of these hugs I started covering something, Sarah (my wife) saw this happening and made an ‘aww’ sound...I understood why; the thing that was being covered was nice and it would be gone...I didn’t mind but I understood her reaction and thought it would be good, in future, to catalogue the process to show the covered love.
I had decorated a hug for Sarah but hadn’t really been happy with the finished ‘hug’ cos I hadn’t really finished it, I was over-excited about posting one I had finished and wanted to ‘try it out’ on Sarah before posting the finished one to Sue.
So I decided to make a special hug for Sarah.
One that’s made up of me and the feeling I get when hugging Sarah.
The feeling that comes from the ‘one’, the ‘chi’, the ‘je nais quoi’ (which means ‘I don’t know what’!) and the idea that we are all made of stars...
...and dirt (the dirt bit is mine).
I began with a star and then wanted to connect the star with the core of the planet via the earth of the Earth.
This was easy because I’ve been having transformative coaching recently and we (Christine, my coach and I) always start our sessions with a grounding, during this time Christine always goes to the core of the planet before arriving back in the room.
So that was the beginning of the ‘mountain’.
The first marks are ‘earth lightening strikes’.
The lava and fire rises and feeds the star inside us.
I realised that the star was everything and I put the stars from the star in in the core of the earth inside ‘lightening mountain’.
I didn’t realise at the time that this mountain range/volcano was the belly until now, writing this...
(There is some stuttering in the audio on the film, it was me not wanting to say ‘stomach’ or maybe ‘tummy’, the “...belly...” was more right than I knew because it seems to me like the hearth of energy in this hug is in that area.)
I was very aware of trying to be artistic but to be very honest to my emotions.
Some strokes...many strokes...go in only one direction and so it was with the trunk/torso (torunk), every mark goes towards the ‘star’ and somehow the energy of these gave me the circular/sphere marks to show life’s perpetual movement.
Each mark after that begins in the centre of the energy ball and flows outwards to the heart and the hugging arms.
The heart is created from it’s centre and follows the line it finds, there is no shading just a lot of heart.
I like drawing grass with 3 lines. If you’re lucky or patient sometimes it looks like grass. That started the grass but there was a lot of ‘empty’ behind the mound the torunk was on...I was going to draw grass in perspective leading to either a dune or a beach and then sea but that felt like just repeating an old picture I LOVE drawing. I thought of Sarah & her connection with nature, how she ‘likes’ having dirty hands from planting, sowing, reaping and decided to include the earth where I’d drawn grass and then be artisitc in those big spaces.
I filled each space between the blades of grass with light to dark browns and they made me think of yellow.
My mind wandered to the star and I pushed the yellow out from her(?) to everywhere but particularly along the armbough.
I initially wanted to make more ‘star shaped stars’ but my hand made circles in the ‘sky’ area above the hearthead. To me they seemed very precise
As I allowed the hug to come, I knew I wasn’t going to ‘draw’ a sky, when I picked up the violet pencil and made more circles and when I knew that I wasn’t going to draw a sky, I realised/remembered that the sky isn’t a colour or rather it doesn’t come from one place and become the sky, it is full of life, a reflection of us and comes from every direction.
I began to make marks under the armbough, left to right, right to left but coming from THERE/HERE/THERE/THERE/HERE the pencil always moved, the sky I wasn’t drawing had to come from everywhere! I think I went away during this bit.
I know I can see what happened chronologically in the photos but my head doesn’t want to say ‘...and then I...’
So what happened was, I chose to go through some blues, remembering to be weird and make the marks come from and go to somewhere new, to come in and go out but have no pattern and to have a different energy because they were from another place.
I think I must have felt like I’d forgotten the hug after a while and wanted to hide our ‘motif’ which is a C and an S joined up and then encirlced. I didn’t try to do that but to do a ‘trippy’ version of it.
One time I tried to do it in a new way and the ‘caterpillar comets’ came. It looked very wrong but felt right. It was the flow of the circles ebbing out from the first one and returning to the back of it. Weird but true. Although I knew they were okay I wanted to soften them, give them solace, make them feel right, which is what the next wide marks are, they also come from everywhere.
All of a sudden (sic (see author)), I felt the music I’ve been learning that Sarah enjoys listening to because it’s very calming (the speed I play it!):
‘Little Whale Explores The Calm Sea’ by Caroline Tyler is the name of the piece and in my book they recommend 160 bpm...nope.
I could feel the warmth of the waves but couldn’t see them and how could I create them?
But because I was cataloguing each change, I realised I could wash over a small amount of what was now skysea or seasky and each photo would show a slow tidal movement, a calm sea. So, I pretended to be a little whale and explor...
...not really, I just thought of that! I was deliberately slow and swept from the corner of the tree and grass towards the area where the armbough met the end of the paper. Part of me wanted to cross the other way but nah...the art said no.
Here, I had a choice, on the other side of the torstrunk was clear space, I could do whatever I wanted, show off a bit, do some angular work, get abstract...again I let the hug through, I thought of Sarah and her love of nature and remembered how nature talks to itself and it’s counterparts. How we’re all connected. How we’re all made of energy and we never disappear. I’ve just realised why! There’s a series called Mr Inbetween and the main character’s brother is passing and the dying brother reminds Mr Inbetween that we’re all matter and “...we cannot cease to exist, we can only transform.” and the tendrils of communication between the ground and the armbough, torunk and the space inbetween began to arrive. As the paths began I thought of Sarah’s thought patterns and her ability to go places in her head way ahead of me and she reminded me of the every which way nature communicates, so the tendrils became vines of communication...
The hearts began as a tool to fill the space but as I drew them I saw the flowers in the ‘crooks’ between the tendrils and vines. A resting place for love.
The shimmer was to offset the balance between these two ‘scenes’, to recognise the similarities in their differences to make them equal in depth.
All the while I was creating this space beneath I felt the emptiness of the ‘sky’ above the hearthead but all the while I was calm, I could feel the buzz of excitement in me about sharing this with Sarah and I wanted to share that feeling. I wanted fireworks, whizzbangs, kapows, and zings. I wanted the warmth to be calm and energised and as keen as I was to make the yellow stars to become star shaped I needed colour and a skewiff feeling so I made the violet circlestars ping and the yellow circlestars, not stars but just pretties and I figured they wouldn’t shimmer but would sparkle, that’s what the blue marks are, uncontrolled sparkles. Almost everything else up there...nearly everything up there from this point goes up, like firewords do except the sort of ‘9’ shaped things. They’re particles.
I was very worried about stopping where I did because I felt the shawl of sky above the armboughs and hearthead looked unfinished and then I realised I’m never going to stop hugging Sarah and that made perfect sense.