Mums

Nell waking up... or dreaming

I like drawing old ladies. They have character and no-one expects them to be beautiful or graceful...although they often are. They are full of interesting wrinkles and contours, never bland. Full of stories and symbolisms, usually they embody someone - a Mum, Great Aunt or Grandma - who is important.
My own mother was ill last year - queue panic, what's app group flurries and early morning motorway dashes. False alarm, but it made me think of how people we love never die, so long as we hold them in our memories. But how does that work from their perspective? And how on earth do you indicate in a drawn animation the idea that someone (Nell) is living in another person's memory? Are they conscious, or just a movie which plays? Can they affect the rememberer, or are they just trapped in a time-loop? How frightening to suddenly jump from being 30 in a maternity ward to being 80 celebrating some anniversary. From first date to deathbed and back. Maybe it's like dreaming. Maybe it would be easier to write this as a book! So much, always so very much more to learn...

New Year, New Nostalgia

On a christmas walk, on the shiny new cycle track past the ornamental pond with its duckhouse and the ancient line of pinetrees screening the railway line. The new people, the off-comers, who have lived their whole lives in these quietly well-ordered streets, named after trees that never grew here - This is their world, but it used to be mine... and just once somebody asks

"You used to live here  before this housing estate was built? What was it like?"

 There was a footpath down to the field, it was always muddy. There was spring where a ghost of a monk used to come and fill a bucket of water, then disappear into a secret tunnel that led to the big house with the fancy wall. But no-one had ever actually seen it. There were two enormous conker trees either side of the entrance to the sloping field . In winter, you could sledge down it, and skim the strangely whirring ice across the pond to shatter on the bank. In summer the meadow flowers and grasses came nearly up to your waist. There were cowslips and shepherd's purse and lady's bedstraw and we looked up their names in the Observer book of wildflowers. There was a horse called Dolly lived in the field sometimes, and when she laid down she flattened the grass all round, you could lie down in the flat bits and hide and no-one would ever find you. In the middle was a wood, with holly trees - no good for climbing but you could slide down the clay banks hanging on to the branches, or hide. At the bottom was a willow tree which grew along the ground and then some branches went straight up. It was like a ship, and the long grass was wavy like the waves of the sea. You could stand in the prow like a pirate, shading your eyes against the sun and see for miles. Climb through the willow and walk all round the pond, balancing on the narrow bank between the water and the brambles. You could drag branches to try to make a bridge to the island. But it never really worked - someone always fell in the water and went home with one wet gray sock. It was Enid Blyton, it was Where the Wild Things were. It was the Phantom Tollbooth. That's what it was like.

The island had a dogrose, dark pink. It had the remains of half-successful bonfires, and tattered pages from a dirty magazine the Big Boys left behind. Next to the pond was a kind of swamp, full of tadpoles and bullrushes, stinky grey mud...and a  stream which ran down the side of the field through a wood; all bluebells, windflowers and primroses. Beyond the pond-edge brambles, and through the fence, lived another horse; pale and elegant with a stripe down its nose. And a brick path to the railway station, with two tiny, scary dogs that hurtled out of a farmyard, barking and jumping.
It was a place where we walked, and talked, and ran and shouted and dreamed and played. Picked flowers, stared at insects, laid in the sun and watched the lazy aeroplanes go over.  It was a place for kids, not for sunday afternoon granddads who preferred the climb to the water tower, via the railway bridge where we waved pointlessly at trains. Not for bicycling family picnics, or for healthy walks; but a place you rushed to, past the haunted house at the fork in the path, stomping through the mud past flowering bushes and huge nettles, hurtling down the grass slope with your brother, with your friends, on your own, hiding from the bad kids...  It was, for a few short years, my world. Before it was a Green Space, it was just a green space. That's what it was like.

And later, it was a racketty pathway, rutted with treeroots over which we rode our bikes, shrieking, downhill; hanging on to the freedom of childhood long after bras and Olevels got in the way. A place where we shared secrets and complaints and dreams of our future. We cried when they built on it, we had thought it was wild... but really we knew it was once an ornamental garden, with metal cages still round the maytrees and concrete stairs making a waterfall into the pond. The garden of the Big House on which, earlier, our own housing estate had been built. Kids probably played there with hobby horses or croquet, like in a Jane Austen novel, and dreamed of being explorers. Some family, who couldn't believe that anyone would one day forget that great grandfather planted that copse, ordered the modelling of that fishpond. Or that people would build houses, then more houses, then a third set of houses all over and fence off the pond so that it was overrun with hopping frogs every year, swarming the road, making traffic swerve and us squeal and jump to avoid them, never stopping to ask what became of all those tadpoles that we used to catch. Those posh children in pantaloons; before it was my world, it was theirs. And every child who played there, every Big Boy with his dirty books and every courting couple who walked the fields whittling or blowing dandelion clocks after a picnic with lashings of ginger beer and cliches... everyone has his own perfect remembered model of this small space, which expanded and contracted to fill the size of the dream and the length of the day. That's what it was like.
And now it's yours. So much smaller, but there are still rookeries that make the sound of summer and ice that whirrs on the pond. There are still tadpoles and mud and hedgerow flowers. And full of small things that ask for your attention. Lie down and watch the insects dance, inspect the leaves of the mosses and listen to the chattering of the squirrels in the quiet between trains. Make grass trumpets and collect acorns to plant.
Find your own ghosts.
Treasure them. 

challenge...and challenge

Trump has been elected. We now have a snap election coming up, with the attendant vulgar, scaremongering and deceitful media coverage, and the terror of the future possibilities. And now, my workplace - my artistic context, research support network and daily what-passes-for-normality - has been deranged, to be replaced with something else, not yet known or understood.

And these are challenges, to which I am exhorted to rise, smiling.
People need challenge. Without it we become bored or complacent. So we seek cures for cancer, we train for marathons...but we also die taking selfies on top of crane towers. Not all challenges are equal.

Working as an artist, an animator is challenging. (working as an illustrator when you are really an animator, doubly so) - the frustrations of trying to fit a layout template onto an organic and irregular story form. Of trying to animate rushing water. Or find a sound that will reliably represent the non-existent and unimaginable. Experimentation, and often failure; submission, and often rejection; technology demands and trying to remain sane and civil when these go horribly wrong. Pushing boundaries - challenging your own skills and stretching them.
I believe in challenge, in confronting your own fears, in saying let's see what happens if I... And more importantly, in doing this alone - yes I CAN cycle up that 3 mile 1-in-4, yes I have a fear of heights but I can fly a glider, or perform on stage at the Sage, or travel to Svalbard, or lose a bunch of weight and learn to surf, or put it all on again and smile and say 'hey-ho'.

Now Harry Lime said, however inaccurately...

So - the challenges of coping with systemic fear and uncertainty are supposed to make me produce my best work ever. Big challenges - justice, equality, overthrowing dictatorships and protesting attacks on democracy; here, anger is useful. There are large things you can do, in community with others, helping each other in solidarity. You can write the Internationale, create posters encouraging people to join the quinta brigada, write Ubu Roi or 1984, film Fahrenheit 9/11. Save the world by painting it.

But when you feel, or when you have been told quite categorically there IS nothing you can do... the challenge is to accept, "deal with", make the best of, to find an opportunity in the middle of an imposition of confusion. I'd love to be the kind of person who says "bring it on, I eat problems for breakfast". But I'm this kind of person. The kind who chooses challenges which are interesting, exciting and will make the world a better place. Can I teach this module? Can I overcome my fear of heights? Can I draw a squid climbing out of a spider suit? Can I organise everything when your mother is possibly dying in a foreign hospital? yes. Can I cope with stuff happening at work/ in the government which seems to make no logical sense and which I suspect I am not being told the truth about? with the feeling of powerlessness and being dragged about? Does it motivate me to seize control?  er, no. It simply make me depressed, the opposite of creative.
These are not useful challenges, they may make me more resilient but they will make me less sensitive. They will make me leap to the defence of the people and the things I love, but they will not help me do the things I love (animation, teaching amongst others) better. Of course we survive - but as an artist and an educator I have to do more than simply survive. I have to dream. I have to make those dreams useful. I have to share the useful dreams and make other people believe they could come true.

If challenge is a central driving force in the work of the artist, If challenge is an exciting, dynamic agent of change, then I would like that to be change for the better. To pick a useful and worthwhile challenge. A friend in Hull told me that there are many ways to be a hero, that stepping in front of a bullet to save another person's life is an easy way.. But that surviving day after day living on Hessle Road is a much harder way to be a hero.

animation will save the world

The infamous Dr Calamari  - a known squid - is unmasked
And if anyone else had suggested drawing a squid  trying
 to get out of a giant spider suit I would snort in derision

OH! yes, of course life would be easier if I made live action movies. I wouldn't have to knit every frame...
which is why I feel animation has to have something live action doesn't - mermaids, old ladies who can fly, spherical people... (hm. Splash/ Mary Poppins/ Monty Python)
It's not just that doing those things in live action would be expensive, tricky, involve expensive post-production and or stunt players.... Its not just that I like drawing, and prefer both the process and the end product of gesture, painting, splodgyness to those of photography...and not just that I prefer to work alone in what colleagues refer to as my splendid fortress of solitude, author - auteur if you must - of my own stories and characters...
It's more to do with the difference between a recording of reality (however artificially constructed) and the depiction of a dream (however lifelike). Building a dam to stop our imaginations running away down the valley of GrownUp...and eventually running dry.