Of the sporadic but okish quantity of drawing and painting I’ve done in the last 3 years (a massive amount compared to 5 sketches I did in the 15 years previous) I am most proud of the one shown above.

It’s not thought out, not accomplished but it was spontaneous and done in spit and ink. There are several in my sketch book in this sequence and they were done at the All about Eve exhibition that Kettles Yard held in when the Rodin exhibition was on in London.

The last time a major Rodin exhibition was held in this county was at the Hayward Gallery on the Southbank and I went along with the rest of the students from my art college. The original plan was to crash through the exhibition and bugger off to the pub. Faced with sculpture upon sculpture of by this astonishing force of nature, we all dropped our crappy coolness and got down to some serious drawing. We didn’t get to the pub. By sketching his work I started to understand his vigour, his conflicts, his desire. All I had with me was a biro and my sketch book but I found myself digging it into the page forcefully as I tried learn by rote the lines he had set down.

Picking up my pens and pencils and forcing myself to draw is like dragging myself to go and do the washing up sometimes. I don’t leap at the the page with joy. I look at it in fear and loathing so often. That’s why drawing in a group can be so useful because the joint discipline gets you moving.

Being at close quarters with Rodin again 20 or more years later reacquainted me with a passion for drawing. A fierce need to get marks onto paper – as urgent a need as kissing a lover. I’d brought my sketch book but had forgotten my pencil case. All I had was a black pen. The echoes of my last encounter were very strong and old confidence floated back into my fingers and I happily gouged into the paper and spat onto my fingers to make smudges for tone.

Drawing Rodin’s Eve enabled me to discover far more that I would have done just by looking. My close observations helped me realise that the model he used was in the early stages of pregnancy (confirmed later on in the exhibition – it was a possible reason why he never finished the study), and that the hands were the most finished part of the sculpture – incredibly delicate compared to the rest of her healthy sturdiness. I did about 4 rough sketches, none took more than 5 mins.

The last time I was that happy painting was trying a new technique at the Oxford art group I was part of. Kieran, our mentor (teacher I guess but it feels too formal) would get us to try a new method every week and this one involved doing a very rough sketch and then taking a putty rubber and randomly rubbing most of the drawing out. Then you would repeat this process over and over and gradually your drawing would emerge on the page as if it were a photograph in developing fluid. I got completely absorbed by the materials I was using. The result was one of my favourite drawings of my own work. And it is of a bloody cheeseplant of all things. The following week I tried to repeat the experience and failed utterly. I think it was because I was trying to achieve a preconceived result rather than getting lost in the process.

This may well be my big huge lesson for my drawing and painting and I can see it taking me a few damn years. Actually now I come to write about it about this, the lesson seems very clear. My trouble when I go out with my sketchbook is that I have some monkey on my back telling to render my chosen view with ‘artistic accuracy’. This is a silly notion. All the successful pieces I’ve done have all been a result of me exploring with the medium.

Please hit me over the head with this when I forget.

I was struck by a little claim to fame from Walberswick, one windblasted seaside holiday last year, regarding the locals harassment of Charles Rennie Macintosh which resulted in his being banged up in the local jail for looking a bit odd while he wrote notes and painted pictures like the one above on holiday in 1914. His broad Scottish accent wrongly placed him as a german spy in the minds of his captors.

I think the First World War brutalised so much of our world and unsurprisingly left its mark on art too. I need to look at this more deeply and get my timelines sorted out but I think we lost an alternative artistic time line that flowed from Macintosh, Klimt, Rodin along with other secessionists. This line was severed by the First World War. It’s design influence was still to be felt in the Deco movement of the 30’s but that too sputtered out completely in the face of World War Two.

I’m trying hard to articulate something here about a kind of art that isn’t as whimsical as Art Nouveau, is derived from representation, organic and beautiful, incorporates elements from graphic design but is patently not the super-realism of post graphic novel Athena poster 80s nonsense. I see it sometimes in Ralph Steadman’s mad cartoons, and found a bit of it in Freda Khalo’s early works (when she wasn’t trying to be Modigliani). It portrays the wonder, the worship of the forms around us and reflects them – but would still manage to piss off a Daily Mail reader.

But to indulge in it seems, to try and work at a piece that can’t draw its heritage directly from Duchamp’s Fountain doesn’t seem possible at the moment – unless you are David Hockney of course. He can get away with bloody anything it seems.

When I paint I want it to be like music. When I write I want it to be like painting.

Is this trying to create synesthesia?