I keep putting up the drawings, moving them around. Watching the light as it moves over them, changing them. They move up and down on the scale of what is working. What is clear – what is alive – what just is – just is unto itself – a completion – an ecosystem – a balance that is without question. John Berger says drawing is a process of corrections. He is looking at the model then back to the drawing. We recognize people, things, but we don’t see them. This becomes clear when we set about drawing them. Then we start to see what we have not noticed. We pay attention – we focus the mind. This energizes the chemistry of the brain in extraordinary ways. Pleasure and attention are closely connected in the functioning of the mind. Pleasure usually brings on attention. It is best to draw what gives you pleasure with materials that feast the eye.

I like the fast slide of the waxy surface – the richness of graphite wet with paint thinner. I am seduced into attention. The gift of pleasure brings me present, in my body’s experience, which in turn brings the mind to attention. It also keeps my mind in relation to my body’s instruction. It is animal attention, an alertness that can stay with change, with movement and chance – open to instinct and counter-point. If it happens I am all there. “All there” is a dream concept – outside the house of self, outside time, outside in the simplest terms – gardener, farmer, woodsman, fisherman. It makes all the difference. Being in the weather. The valley sometimes feels small now – when I was a child it was borderless – it contained many continents and exotic destinations. It had room in it for many inhabitations, incarnations and epic adventures. But the sky – it was the sky – the weather – that lifted the top off my head and made it all move and change. It conducted the changes. It ran the show. There was no negotiation – no dance could bring on rain. The only doorway was participation. A day in the hay shed under the roar of the rain on the metal roof, or a day of wet, totally wet, wet through, working with streams and dams and soggy mud. Water running down off your hat into your boots. Mind filled with the steady pour of rain and water running and wind. Eyes full of the delicious tracking of a boot in the mud, tracking channels to divert water – brown, bounteous flow of water. The whole valley running water and the river rising, lifting, gaining strength and speed – pulling at the valley. The soggy resistant banks overcome by the slow rise of the pull – the ruthless violence, an irrepressible tug and undertow. Whirlpools forming – the rattle and splash of rocks now buried under torrent – quieted. The dramas came and went – constantly playing out – forces leaving no room for doubt, for conclusion, for concept, for anything. The river holds the nature of our spirit. It mirrors our constant movement and it calms our jumpy minds. It is Rumi’s field out beyond right doing and wrong doing where even the terms you and I disappear – washed away.

I work with horses and boats. Horses because they know what I’m talking about. They, being animals of flight, are well informed. – constantly up-to-date on now. Their jitters and nervousness informed me. With my hands on their bodies I could see better what was going on. They were restless, fly tormented weather vanes – diviners of nature’s fickle moods. Boats came later – found strewn around the landscape of west Mayo – in every stage of decay. Skeletons of buoyancy. The boats are not for the river. They are a craft to hold me in that place – in the movement and expansiveness of weather and mind – to keep me in a place where I am always outside – in the beauty of that valley, in how it informs the trees outside my studio in Norristown PA – to keep me in the pleasure of it – in the full attention of the child, soaked through, mud splattered and mesmerized.

This is not a romantic story. It is in all of us – in our genes and in the spaciousness of all our memories. We are all, all this. We are the living breathing planet. It is the spaciousness that opens up for John Berger when he draws. He says he does not draw with technique – he draws with the remembered experience of drawing. The door opens. Mesmerized. The drawing comes in, naturally, effortlessly, part of the eco system, vibrating with energy.

Tim Hawkesworth