I Live Here Now

Product Information

Initially, the main objective was simply to put a response – any sort of response – on the page and to get comfortable with the kinetic challenge of carrying a sketchbook, a handful of pencils, making a mark and at the same time, walking safely through a space in a particular direction. The heat does not draw you in but makes you rather retreat to the shadows and pull down the blinds, as if in Rome or Athens. I felt at home with these small creatures, reassured by their presence on the wet stone, by their proliferation, even. The professor even allowed me a moment’s nostalgia for the Soviet produced three and five litre glass jars that were such a ubiquitous detail of my Moscow year — thick blue-green glass vessels packed with pickled cabbage, or marrows, or mushrooms become slimy and viscous, too large or many for the fridge, they sat out in rows on frosted balconies, in easy reach of the kitchen table. I think of the encumbrance of having a well-known surname, but of how this matters less in Scotland, and even less in the international collaboration of our Crown Letter, remembering how glad I was when Dettie first mispronounced my surname, the relief of remaining unrecognised, keeping me safe and hidden, distinct from my father’s name.

And I stayed there under the speaker, waving as they weaved back and forth along the lines of barriers, waving back, all the way to security, and vanished from sight. They were trying to explain the long unwieldy detours to people who wanted to cross the road, except they didn’t know the shape of the city so had to be helped by other people who had wanted to cross the road, but like us, been brought to a standstill. My dreams snap shut on me on waking, I try to put a finger in, as though prising into a mollusc, to prod the flesh of it, but the very act of trying to touch seems to provoke the snapping shut. The voice as it enumerates these marching regiments with their medals, their histories, colours and clothing, is simply the voice of my longed for father; it is the same voice that made up stories for my brother and I as children, that compelled our earliest imagination, a voice that is solid and warm and holds me, keeping the more frightening things of the world at bay for a while. I hold on to these traces of his voice, the slight breaks in its rise and fall, the pauses, as marked on my memory as the rhythm of creaks on the stair in the house I grew up in, where I lay in bed and heard him climb the stairs to his study at night, to prepare for his performances.She held it up to the electric light for me to admire as she spoke of the wonder properties of this fruit that could ward off the most malign threats and diseases. They are evidence of my lived experience moment to moment, the layering of marks recording the movement of my body when walking and the constant scanning of my vision as it alternates between a broad and narrow focus on all that I encounter. The doors were opened wide on the small back garden and the sky above the helipad of the vast complex opposite was dense with rain that fell as a fine curtain and then more furiously as we played towards the distant figures in chairs and wheelchairs, looking out. The shadows of the people were cut at a diagonal beneath their shoulders, as if going down a cardboard valley. In the café window on the street below there is a poster of the same bandstand, drawn by Leon Kossoff.

At the back of the house cups of tea and coffee are handed out through the kitchen window from a kitchen full of shiny urns and steam.

It’s wonderful that you feel inspired to set out on your own walking drawing journey and it sounds the perfect way to become familiar with your new surroundings.

We headed home through the park in darkness, to the sound of speeches from an impromptu rally taking place in the children’s playground. It is true that they seem to be more constant these days, a permanence in their windows, continually painting and working. We told the professor’s wife our Russian legends of oblepikha handed down by grandmothers and mothers.I wondered at the power of these roots, for what emerged looked deceptively delicate, tiny leafed branches, that had managed to split open the new tarmacked surface with ease. The varieties of dusk, of street and traffic lights, rush hour, the smell of it, all the rooftops and windows and the streets, years of walking, of finding my way, laid down in them, everything at odds with this quietness of the street where I have chosen to stay for work and for confinement, and yet they are both in the same world, and I hold one within the other. I swim with my nose at the level of the water, perfectly held between the air and the underwater, my eyes fixed on the island before me that is transformed, transcendent — the real world before me holding within it the dream, the idyll of the painting.