Postcard from Glasgow: Shelters

I started making these small drawings of shelters, and trees, last November, as the trees shed their yellow. They were about inhabitable spaces, in the mind’s eye, and in the drawing. I made them on torn up strips of old life drawings from twenty years ago, that I did not want to throw away, regretting the waste of good quality paper. The images kept on coming, as if wanting to be painted. When I taped them to the wall in the spring, they seemed somehow to fit the awful circumstances in which they were now situated. Not a direct depiction, but not unrelated to the bleakness. And at the same time they were about a sort of refuge, a waiting or suspension. It’s November again. And the war is relentless, still. And I am still painting shelters.

First published in November 2022