This drawing was created on a wet Sunday in the early ‘80s. It is a profile portrait of myself as a 19-year-old seated in front of wooden French windows and florid wallpaper, drawn by my dying mother. Using a scrap of paper and a found pencil, as a young art student I had an idea, a reverse of Whistler’s painting of his mother Arrangement in Grey and Black; a drawing by the artist’s mother.
It was a thin idea. However, it was to produce something much more valuable and surprising: a drawing that captures the trace of her hand, her looking eye and response to a son who left far from home for a university life in the south.
It is both a terrible and a wonderful drawing. Though technically poor, it is decisively accurate, simple and concise. Ignoring the background entirely, she clearly struggles with the chair, fitting the lines and form together as an approximation, laid out as if on the floor or left hanging in the air. No matter. Her attention is on the face, the thing she knows best. It is large, the profile tracing the nose and generous chin covered in diagrammatic and hastily marked stubble. The glasses sit confidently on the nose. There is a watchful eye and an unlikely smile, and the hair, auburn, something she always liked and commented on, heavily shaded. The collarless shirt, sprouting thin symmetrical arms, is carefully buttoned with interspersed dots, whilst the legs, less important, tentatively hang from a faint set of braces, sweeping down to pointed feet that were in fact naval deck shoes. My body floats, framed, suspended in time and space, as was the case.
Looking at it again, as I regularly do, 38 years later, it is clear that this was not just a drawing, or even a role reversing act, but a paper certificate confirming existence, a life about to be lived and a life about to be lost, both at a pencil greying threshold, waiting for something to happen. It has become a loving goodbye, a wordless letter.
