Peacock world
The peacocks alight, and get their genes mixed up with the dancers
Around the time that I was trying to persuade the dancers to get onto some canvas and start to make some proper paintings, Rachel Amey, who writes poetry for performance, asked me if I would like to make some peacocks for her upcoming performance in the Edinburgh Festival. ‘Peacock Blue’ was going to be a poem of about forty minutes, and she wanted images that could be projected onto a large screen behind her.
I loved the idea of having something like this to play around with. It was also strange to have an external deadline, particularly with images rather than words. It reminded me of preparing a conference paper; I would get excited by the idea, and also really antsy and nervous, until I had found my angle, and sketched out the bones of what I was going to say. What was I going to do with peacocks?
As with the dancers, I started by doing straight drawings, this time from reference photos of peacocks.
Even though there was no real pressure, I remember experiencing a kind of panic about whether or not I was going to manage to make anything that would work for a specific brief that had come from outside of me. I wondered how on earth people managed to make a living from using their art to serve other people’s agendas.
One of the ways I had learnt to deal with deadlines in the past was to just open to ideas, take the first one that seemed ok, and run with that. There was no endless angsting about which idea might be better, no abandoned dry runs, no going over and over trying to make something better. I just wanted to get the damn thing off my desk so that I could breathe again.
Of course, this was different. It was a pleasure to be making art for someone rather than having to write a lecture or a research paper. But my body reacted to the external imperative in a similar way, recognising something. So, where an experienced graphic artist would probably have made lots of drawings, letting ideas play around on the page, before deciding what was working the best, I took the first drawings I made that looked as if ‘they would do’, and instead played around with them digitally to create variations.
I felt the pressure, and I also loved it. I loved that I was making something that would go with another person’s words, that I could contribute something visual to an event. Rachel was happy with what I produced, and made an amazing slide show. The show itself was brilliant, but sadly it wasn’t recorded.
A month or so later, I had to take a train down to England. The pressure was off, I had no deadline, no agenda. As the train sped through the countryside, I started doodling in a small sketchbook. It turned out that the peacocks were just waiting for me, dying for a chance to come out and play. They wanted to overlap, dive, mix up, and…. dance. And they came out with their hair in the style of a Hoysala dancer; big, piled up locks, now ending in peacock tail feathers.
A bit later in that journey, these ones appeared in an even smaller sketchbook. One of them also had Hoysala hair, or at least a Hoysala headband:
Then this one, with her own version of the tribangha1, an Indian aesthetic technique which bends a dancing body at three points (head/shoulders, hips, knees), to convey movement and life energy:
I couldn’t help the dancers merging with the peacocks, even though I was tired of seeing hackneyed ads on a human/animal theme all over the place. It just happened, and after it did, it seemed to me that they were saying something about human/animalness, about a lack of separation into species or forms. The dancers and the peacocks swapped elements; here the peacock has Hoysala hair, breasts and a dancing leg; the human has peacock hair, and a kind of peacock-merged standing body:
The creatures didn’t seem to have a problem with any of it.
Of course, as many so times before, as soon as I started to try to get them onto canvas (still feeling that this was surely what I was aiming for), they began to decay. Like every other wave, peacock time seemed to be over.
But the creatures stayed around in various guises for quite some time.
I love the drawings Tamsin, they are very beautiful and energetic, and what colors!! I'm curious, you said in two posts already something in the line of "as soon as I bring them into the canvas they start to decay". I totally understand that passing a sketch into a canvas can be tricky and can get stuck and lifeless very easily. Would you say it's something that happens to you often? Why do you think this is? Is there canvases where you didn't feel this way? I remember that I struggled a lot in the past with this, but now it had been a while since I don't think about this translation. It made me wonder how I overpassed this moment, but I truly don't remember...
Thanks for reading Nelson!