Nicholas Hedges

Art, Writing and Research

Locks II

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Following a post I wrote back in 2017 (Locks) I’ve been looking again at the idea of creating small works using drawings made by my son and somehow reflecting the idea of the drawings as keepsakes and mementoes of times spent together. I took some of his drawings and using a lightbox, traced parts of them in both pen and pencil, trying to create images that were like locks of hair, the results of which can be found below.

Photographing work like this always strips it of its subtlety, but nonetheless, I was quite pleased with what I made. They don’t quite have the ‘lock of hair’ look I want just yet, but it’s a start.

My Son’s Drawings II

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I’ve written before about how I find inspiration in my young son’s drawings, or in how he draws. He drew this picture before breakfast one day and I was very taken aback by it, particularly the way he’d coloured it in, using (in the main) fairly neat blocks of different colours. It has inspired me to just draw, to not think too much about what one is drawing, or rather how one is drawing, but to just take, as Paul Klee famously said, the line for a walk.

It shares something with a painting he did some times ago in which again, he painted using blocks of individual colour.

‘Missded’ 2

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I recently completed the third (although titled as the second) in my series of stitched works based on drawings completed by me and my son several months ago. Tomorrow I will cut the piece up to create the ‘tokens’.

The original drawing is shown below:

More Little Words

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Leading on from my last post about my son’s scribbled post-it notes, I looked again at the tracings I made and was reminded me of the work I did in the summer, painting shadows under the trees at Shotover.

Inspired of course by Chinese and Japanese calligraphy, the ‘three little words’ copied from my son’s scribbles shared something with these shadow paintings and so, I traced the lines again, this time using a brush.

Three Little Words

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Iris created a treasure hunt for me and Eliot; a trail of post-it notes stuck around the flat, each containing a clue as to the location of the next. Once we’d completed the hunt and solved the puzzle (letters which formed the words ‘I am Amazing’), Eliot decided to do one of his own. He too stuck dozens of post-it notes around the flat, each with a scribbled line which he told me was writing.

It goes without saying that I thought it a very sweet thing to do and again I used the notes as a source for some play of my own, tracing the lines he’d drawn – written – on the post-its, and then drawing over them in felt-tip pen. I was immediately struck by the fact that they did indeed resemble a writing of sorts, albeit one as yet unknown and undeciphered.

Spaces In Between

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Much of my work of the last ten years or so has been to do with the past, with imagining a moment in the past in all its lost ‘presentness’. The work I’ve been making recently with my 3 year old son’s drawings (‘Missded’) has thrown up what could be an interesting metaphor in that regard.

As I’ve written recently, where my son’s original drawings were ‘about’ lines, the transferring of those drawings to canvas is a process more concerned with spaces. In other words, the lines on the canvas, which echo the original pattern of the drawings, are lines drawn around spaces rather than a single line drawn through a space as in my son’s original drawing. It’s this contrast which interests me.

It reminds me of some work I did quite a few years ago when I walked a route around town, capturing what I could see in lists of words. When I looked at the route ‘drawn’ on my GPS unit I was interested in the spaces between the lines of my walk and all that had happened in those spaces – all the things which were part of the same moments captured on my lists, but which I hadn’t witnessed.

The past moment, in all its ‘presentness’, is like that line drawn in a matter of seconds across the paper, and history, the recreation of that line through the delineation of many empty spaces.

With a pile of cut out spaces left after the job of transferring the image to canvas, I started another piece which used those fragments, arranging them on the fly to create a pattern.

I’ve no idea yes what this will lead to, but I like the organic feel of the piece. I’m imagining that it will become a more intricate, finished work, and again, this will provide an interesting contrast between the piece made by my son (an intricate pattern made in seconds) and that made by me (an intricate pattern, derived from the drawings, but made over many hours).

‘Missded’ 1

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The images below show the three stages (so far completed) of the first in a series of works entitled “Missded”. The word ‘missded’ is one my son used when he’d said he’d missed me: “I missded you daddy”.

The first image is the original drawing we made together, the second is the tracing I made of that drawing and the third, the canvas onto which I have outlined the pattern (having cut out the shapes from the tracing).

It was a difficult job, trying to cut such difficult shapes – and to remember where they were meant to go on the canvas – but that uncertainty and the lack of accuracy reflects in some ways the theme of the work itself; the remembered act, that is, me and my son drawing together.

What was interesting was the difference between the making of the drawing and the creation of the template, in that the original drawing is very much about the lines we made whereas the template is much more concerned with the spaces between – the shapes which I could cut out and draw around.

Again this somehow reflects the nature of the work’s theme; that is missing someone. The days on which I do see my children are the lines outlining the gaps when I don’t – the spaces in between. This could become a whole other area which I shall explore later.

Locks

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Following on from my last post, the images below show tracings I made of the same drawings made with my son, this time in pencil. There was no particular reason why I made them in pencil; it was something that seemed a good idea. Aesthetically, I’ve always liked pencilled lines and, as a result, I really liked these particular tracings.

As with the coloured versions, I stacked them in a pile and it was only then that I realised what these images reminded me of.

To me, they were like preserved locks of hair – keepsakes of people and times and as such they’ve become a perfect line of work to explore.

Tracings

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When you’re a father, separated from your children a few days each week, the things you do with your children when you have them become especially precious. I find I take more photographs when I have them as they somehow sustain me in the days when I don’t see them. The same applies to the things they make; drawings, paintings and so on.

A few weeks ago, Eliot asked me to do some drawings with him, whereby he would draw on the page and I would follow the line he made. It was a very simple thing, but he loved it, and the images we made were lovely.

It’s drawings like these which become so important in those days when I don’t have the children, and, as I mentioned in my last post, these in particular seem to lend themselves to work I made a few years back, where I would stitch ‘images’ from sources such as GPS data (taken from walks), or old trench maps.

As a start, I began by tracing the drawings using the same felt-tips as we used in the original drawings. Given that these stitched works will, in some respects, be about memory, the fact these tracings are not entirely accurate, alludes nicely to the idea of memory itself not being an entirely accurate draughtsman.

As I drew them (the time difference between the ‘moment’ in which they were made and the length of time it took me to trace them also alludes to the idea of working to recapture a moment in the past) I piled them up and began to appreciate the aesthetic of the piles of tracings, where previous drawings would show through.

I’ve always loved drawings or paintings with scribbles and lines and these piles seemed to point to another way of using these drawings – another possible outcome. It was only when I did the same with tracings I made in pencil that another possible work began to emerge, one which was exactly in keeping with the idea of memory, family and recovering past times.

© Nicholas Hedges 2006-20

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