Drawing is my favourite way to see a new place. I do most of my drawing in sketchbooks when I travel somewhere, recording what I see and then working from what I have gathered when I am back home into further pieces. I enjoy experiencing a place through drawings.

The last couple of years I have found myself in a bit of rut with sketchbooks, finding that I force them a little too much with predetermined ideas of what I want them to look like. Often I’ll have thoughts in my head of sketchbook drawings I have done in the past and try to emulate them, which never results in a good drawing. When we went to Thailand round the start of this year, I intentionally went wanting to draw in a different way to the usual scrappy oil pastels.

Sometimes with drawing I can’t help myself but want them to be finished pieces; something that can be shown immediately. This time I went into it with the idea that the sketchbook was there to record studies and act as a diary, thoughts and drawings that are intended to be developed in the studio later.

These drawings were done mostly with a wet carbon pencil, resulting in a very free flowing mark. You don’t have to apply much pressure at all, a much gentler way of drawing, contrasting the faster pace I normally work at. Sometimes you fall into a new way of making but this felt more like I had purposefully shunted things in a new direction. I think it’s natural to work through phases, making work in a particular way for a particular period and then moving onto something else. I think though that I have a tendency to grow tired of things really quickly, I am just bad at realising when it is time to move on.

It is easy to get hung up on style. I get trapped sometimes in a cycle of thinking that repeating what was successful in the past will be more successful in the future. But that is when you become stagnant. It’s good to change, to do something different, ultimately these changes though are never too far away from what you’ve always been doing. That’s always the worry though that the moment you recognise you are making a change, that you will end up further away from where you wanted to be. You never want to force these things. It was refreshing though to go ahead and intentionally change, but on reflection realise you’ve barely changed at all. The majority of style stays the same no matter how hard you push it.

For the past six months I have been without a studio. I have been drawing on the kitchen table and have a corner set up for working on small paintings in the flat. It has felt strange as I can’t act as quickly as I normally would in executing ideas. Things need setting up and cleaning down when you’re making work where you also live. There isn’t the option to leave big heaps of work lying around, coming and going from them as you please.

I haven’t been able to expand on these drawings from Thailand as much as I would have liked to. A new direction is exciting, but it’s frustrating to not be able to act upon it due to circumstance. I have a fear that ideas are slipping past me.

Above are drawings I have made using the forms from my sketchbook. They are small developments, trying to construct further compositions and push things on.

Any compositions that don’t work I have been tearing up and reconstructing as collages. Things become quite removed from the original source, but I like that, they echo what they initially were.

I’m trying not to get too caught up in this idea of not having the space to quickly act upon new directions. Instead wanting to accept that working is a slower process for the time being. It doesn’t matter if I don’t get round to finishing ideas, the process doesn’t have to be linear, I’ll just try and catch what I can. It’s all one big mess anyway.