Modigliani and the Malahat

Dear Sarah - Day 300 of our Daily Drawing Exchange

Hi Sarah!

Maybe Anton could steal the name Pumpy Jugfest for his band… (for anyone reading this and not sure what I’m talking about, click on yesterday’s post…)

Today was a bit of a mixed blessing. Went to bed last night with a vaguely scratchy throat that I thought might have been the result of some irritation caused by dusty goat poop particles inhaled during yesterday’s cave climbing endeavours. Alas, when I awoke this morning it seemed a cold was trying hard to develop.

Reluctantly (FOMO and the hard reality of missing out on even a minute of our final days of climbing here), I took the day to rest, guzzle fluids, and do schoolwork when I was vertical.

I managed to complete various pages including several about Modigliani and his nudes - this is the final one in that sequence. Looking at it now, I realize there’s a typo in the handwritten bit at the bottom! Fortunately, many of these are done at least in part on the iPad so I can go back and edit. There will be a fair bit of that, I fear, when I’ve completed this weird ass draft, get home, print it all out, and then have to fix all the things that could be improved.

Fortunately/unfortunately, there are a LOT of pages and not much time, so the deadline is forcing me to just keep going and not be too precious about any of what’s happening.

Can you believe we are at Day 300 of our daily drawing exchange????

Looking forward to 300 (plus) more :)

Cheers,
Nikki

Hi Nikki,

So sorry you’re sick, although it’s really quite amazing that you’ve been healthy up until now, given all the planes, trains, buses, crowds etc. And no, I can hardly believe we’ve kept up the drawing project this long! One of the most satisfying, infuriating (not you, the learning process) and meaningful things I’ve done.

Just got back from the funeral up island. Rained all the way up, and there were two accidents on the way down. I do not like driving the Malahat. When I was a child, my father (who was the only neurosurgeon on the island) was always on call for Malahat head injuries (of which there were many). I grew up with an ingrained fear of that road. I got home about three minutes before sunset. I’ve stopped driving at night, especially in the rain, so I was really happy to be home.

In the spirit of “nobody cares if I pull out my sketchbook and start to draw” I had a few minutes in the church before the service started, and I heard Danny Gregory (and you) whispering in my ear—“You can draw anywhere.” So I got out my tiny notebook (2” X 3”) and did a quick sketch of the setup at the front of the church. Flowers, candles, photos of Maggie’s mom and her family, her cane (carved by one of her sons) and an urn with her ashes (the curvy thing in the centre of the table). I wasn’t close enough to realize that it was an urn, but I could see something sticking out of it (hence the squiggles). Turns out, her son had carved a lid for the urn, which was quite lovely close up. I will give the sketch to Maggie, even though it’s not very good. The whole experience made me miss my own mother, who took her sketchbook everywhere (although, being a good UC minister’s daughter, she probably would not have drawn at a funeral). But she would have been overjoyed that I was drawing.

XO S