Puss ‘n’ Boots

Still nursing the lurgi this morning so I was sat with my legs up on a footstool wearing my cool Magnum HiTec boots. Sparta Psychokitteh came along and stretched herself on top of my snazzy leggings. I’m a scribbler. So I scribbled her.

As I was drawing, I drifted off into ‘the zone’. This sort of repetitive, physical mark-making induces a kind of meditative state in me. I thought about the books I’d read and the documentaries I’d watched over the past few weeks while I’ve been ill, about paleolithic art and cave paintings in particular. Most of the art from the Stone Age is recognisably animal or human, but there are lots of examples of abstract shapes, grids, dots and dashes and a number of theories about them. One is that early artists were trying to depict entoptic imagery, another that they were drawing hallucinations caused by intoxicants or rituals. I wondered how many artists have been consulted in the formulation of these theories because when I’m in ‘the zone’ I get totally absorbed in the phusicality of drawing; the physical nature of making marks over and over again. Were the earliest artists in our species experiencing something similar? Hmmmmm.

Drawn into my A6 blue silk recycled sketchbook with a Pentel V5 pen, size 0.5mm and Faber Castell Pitt drawing pens sizes XS, S and B. (Sparta chewed the bead off the ribbon and I had to tie it back on and it’s skanky now!).