TIM BAKER

This has been a long time coming, since the 5PM Challenge fizzled out in July, although I posted several pieces during that period that were earmarked for this without the 5PM Challenge tag or number – especially Windy Stormy Day, River Blues and Windy Day and Evening Crane. But I restarted it in November, because of Lockdown V2: Pathetic Boogaloo and that it is a post-Inktober winter thing for me.

When this challenge was in full effect I was still creating river pieces, not having yet burnt out on that subject. I have revisited it since in ‘Twoism’ and I still feel the same way even though that piece is succesful, I don’t want to push it like I did. It’s a bit like leaving land fallow for a year to let it recover, I hope to come back stronger in future.

• 

• 

• 

Not many watercolours this time around, I did a few in my A6 etchr sketchbook of the river but this is the only one I don’t hate:

An ink spatter served as a flock of Hitchcockian birds – sparrows? who were alternating between two trees loudly, and an exercise in diagonals – always fascinated at the barges and boats along the river and the shapes the reflections and the ropes – sheets in nautical terminology, confusingly if you are sailing….

Given I have stopped the online life drawing and the real-life portrait and life sessions haven’t restarted or only did for a short while, life studies are rare. Here are a few recent drawings of John, one in a Manet mode thankfully without a serving girl, in the days of Black Lives Matter that is quite rightly seen as problematic.

And the second a quick environmental drawing showing the clutter in the flat! I probably spent as much time drawing the background which felt rather too detailed but it is an important piece documenting life in lockdown and my life.

Talking of lockdown the abstracts being winter have come to the fore – and have taken on a more political/topical slant. The abstracts are a difficult one, in part taking a line for a dance, but another part drawing in the dark and confusing to me sometimes because I don’t know where they are headed. It’s necessary to keep doing them as I refine and learn the symbology which is a mix of really obvious – no entry signs, crossed boxes during the US election, etc – to very subconsciously mysterious.

‘Amnesia Moon…’ is the latest, created in a local disabled toilet at night during a massive rainstorm as I had nowhere else to work and needed some space.The refracted light is common in these pieces, boxes splintered into planes and shards, abstract alien landscapes, broken and desolate. Chaotic but they have a rhythm to them. It is subtitled ‘A Beginning’ because it’s the start of a new A4 sketchbook, an Artway Enviro with recycled hardboard covers and 170gsm paper.

And conversely the ‘An Ending’ pieces below it are the final two page spread of the previous A4 sketchbook, the Seawhite A4 book which I bought the day after the first full lockdown started, so it has been with me all through the first lockdown. Oddly at the same time I finished the A5 sketchbook as well, almost a year to the day after buying that one. New lockdown, new sketchbooks!

I have cooled on the use of Parallel Pens recently but this is a comeback, adding the Kuretake Brush Pen for which I have added a sable tip which was meant for the Kuretake 40/50 pen but fits the #13 and my #8. I am using Rotring Technical Pen ink in it which is good but thinking of trying the Hero 234 or a darker ink, it isn’t as black. Great ink for brush pens, I got that tip from Teoh of Parkablogs.

• 

• 

Another Parallel Pen abstract is this piece in the old WHSMith A4-ish sketchbook which still has some way to go, but like all of my books I infill all the empty pages, leading to this temporal and mixed media juxtaposition with the old 2006 Derbyshire tree drawings.

And I said earlier, lockdown has become more of a direct subject in my abstracts, and indeed there has been 5 posted Lockdown Series drawings and more I’ve not posted yet, or weren’t happy with. The jail-like bars seems obvious, as is gallows, Trump-esque golf flags and tripods – less obvious are the pyramid forms which on their side become a jagged edge, and fractured glass shapes. And the circles with tendrils/spirals coming out of them are representations of the virus as first seen in ‘The Battle‘ 5PM Challenge #68 which was created a few days after the first lockdown began.

I have some not-great-but-ok Simply Art pens from Poundland – yes they are selling Daler art materials there now! They draw a bit scratchily but if you wet the page they work far better – those are the makers used in Lockdown 3: The Bends – named after the Radiohead album that has guided me through lockdown 1. Lockdown 2’s ‘If I Can’t Own Nothing Then Nothing Can Own Me’ is a quote from Billy NoMates – FNP, a very punky attack at the system.

• 

• 

• 

And finally an abstract landscape coming full circle to the earlier pieces using the Molotow, Kaweco Sport Fountain Pen and waterbrush. I am very fond of this one but I have NO idea what it is about. Yet. I like how necessity in the muddy wash and not liking some of it I bombed it with the white marker, which actually gave it depth and energy.

I have written a fair bit on Instagram about my abstracts, and the challenge they are to others – I really get the feeling that fellow artists get them but others do not. There is a dialectic here where they are the most abstruse in subject but are also the most personal works I do. And some of the most important, it is not just the playpen where I experiment but also a direct line to my subconscious.

Some would dismiss it as doodling but they are more direct and directed than that, yet it is not automatic drawing but somewhere in between. The ciphers and symbols that pop up reflect deeper concerns and states of my mind. Some of my abstract drawings I hate to look at because they reflect more of my internal state than I would like, especially the darker side. I create them and go ‘eek’ and put them away immediately. And others are more mysterious and need more analysis by – you guessed it – drawing them more.

It quite often comes to me in the end while I am doing them what these symbols mean, but some evade meaning and that’s fine.Partly because I am also fond of the spiritual self-mythologising symbology of Klee’s work, or even some of the Surrealist abstracts. Hence abusing Klee’s quote into taking a line for a dance.

I dance, I don’t walk.