Season to Write, Season to Draw
Transitioning out of the written word to sketching…
The insights naturally came to a close the other day. Walking up the hill opposite our home with our little desert girl, I felt my senses settle and the next steps felt clear. The season to write is drawing to a close and a season to draw is upon me.
In recent posts, I have gravitated towards a place beyond words. It has felt like the slowing of wheels, gradually coming to a stop. Like a train pulling into a station and the passenger, myself, feeling an urge to get off.
I stayed with these insights for another day, curious to see where they might lead me. In the past I’ve made quick decisions - acted decisively, as my PhD topic emphasises - but this decision was a more gentle knowing. It was less of an order and more of an invitation with the question, How about getting off her and exploring this town?
The town is drawing. As a much younger Art GCSE student - this is some 30 years ago now! - I had a keen eye for pencil and paper work. I could look at almost any object and do a fairly good job representing it on paper. My spatial vision seems to come naturally. For example, when driving through narrow parts of the road, places where other drivers seem to hesitate, I sense naturally the dimensions and where to turn the wheel. That’s not to say I won’t err one day but generally, my ability to see and act decisively with my body is something I can rely on.
Sometimes I wonder if years of karate training has helped here. This ability to take sensory data, primarily visual, and do something through my body with it in response. I am most definitely a visually-oriented person, at least when my eyes are open. It can work in my favour, such as during a museum visit. Provided I’m in a section that interests me, like Islamic art or archaeology, I will be fully absorbed and that will stimulate a positive emotional experience. It can also work against me. I might not be thinking of food but put a bar of chocolate in front of me and I’ll suddenly want to devour the lot, especially if the wrapping is bright and enticing!
Having said this, it’s been a while and this time, I want to draw people. This is something I’ve never done. I remember attempting it a few times in my teenage years but honestly, it felt too complicated. I would much rather draw a mug or piece of fruit then transform that into another medium like a silk painting, oil painting, or pottery.
This time, the motivation to draw is different. As part of my PhD a reflexive tool I’ve planned is sketching people doing karate with a focus on decisive action in movement. That moment when the practitioner strikes, for example, how exactly do they move? To explore this, I will need to observe plenty of recorded and later, live, training sessions and competitions. Then attempt to sketch what I see.
In qualitative research, so much seems to rely on the written word. We use words to interview people, to transcribe what they say, to thematically analyse what they say, to then categorise what they say, sometimes to generate theory. And yet increasingly I’m drawn to other forms of expression. A sense or knowing that I feel is that decisive action is driven by energy. There is a biological or physiological component here as well as an esoteric one. There is also a learned component.
And so there is an invitation to pause the writing, to step out of personal reflections for a while and turn my attention outwards to observation of others. Not in the way that I do for a living, which is grounded in Psychology. I observe behaviour, continually assessing what this might mean in terms of mental health and wellbeing. I teach my students to do this too with their clients. This background might come in handy for states of mental health and wellbeing can certainly impact decisive action in movement, particularly under pressure. But the context is karate and the focus is on solo and paired training and competitions, kihon, kumite, and kata.
It is exciting to think where this might lead. The writing practice that I’ve established - be it late at night or first thing in the morning - is around 30 minutes long. I am hoping for a sideways shift. Instead of picking up my iPad, I will pick up my sketchbook and pencils. Then I will pick up the iPad for at first, I will need to find recordings of karate in action to observe. Later, I will observe live training sessions but that will require a shift in practice logistics and isn’t worth thinking of now.
I’ve spent a lot of time in personal reflective writing. It’s naturally found a transition, an estuary of sorts, into a wider ocean. One where my personal experience is still there but it is surrounded by so much more.
As I prepare to swim this estuary, I pause to acknowledge the journey it has taken to write again after 6 years of not being able to write or create. I am grateful for this space on Substack to document my reflections. It might happen that I share my sketches here, who knows. I am not feeling that yet but this transition feels gentle and open to change. Ironically, it isn’t decisive action that has brought me to this point. If anything, it has been following the stream of consciousness that led me here.
Writing will still happen. There is no getting away from the fact that I need to write for my PhD and work. I need to publish some of my teaching materials, a task I have avoided for years. I have been building a wealth of teaching content these past few years, testing its delivery with cohort after cohort of students, listening to their feedback, observing their reactions, making tweaks here and there. And parallel to this shift out of personal reflective writing into drawing, I feel a natural pull towards penning these lessons in a more comprehensive way. Perhaps not quite a book designed for publishing but certainly, a manual of sorts for our students.
I haven’t sought an audience for this first season of writing. But if you have been reading my words, thank you for taking the time.