Just this week I was sitting quietly drinking my coffee and trying to work out how to do live cross-referencing in Indesign and my friend came to me and said: “Can I ask you two very important questions?” I said Yes he could, although I was a bit nervous because he asked permission.
And then he said. “Firstly what have you done with the flying hyena? and secondly “Do you have a Weber?” It was useful that these questions came together, because I could focus my answer upon the second. And say that I have very little to do with Webers in life. This is because even though the Weber might cook chicken very well, it is a symbol of Patriarchy. And of course therefore only my husband knows if we have a Weber and how to cook on one, and where it is. So you better ask him instead. And other such non-nonsense.
Because when he mentioned the hyena belonging to the first question, I was seized with regret, that I had ever shown anyone the drawing I was trying to resolve. It was too soon. I hadn’t taken good advice. And my friend was perplexed by the lone hyena in the sky floating above a paw-paw tree.
The problem all started with a phone call from the best editor in the world asking me to do a story and to do the illustrations for the story. Both to go together. For money this time. Not just for Exposure. Which is more the currency I am used to being paid in. And these drawings and this story are very very important to me. And I want the drawings to be the most beautiful ever in the universe. So I have been drawing and drawing for weeks. And running and walking around in circles and only eating marmite toast and not being able to sleep. Because the drawings have not been working out. And there is a deadline.
And I have been getting up at 3 in the morning suddenly awake and suddenly knowing perfectly well how to fix up all the problems with the drawings. And then they have been getting better until about 5, but then by 6, they have become shit again. And I have been chewing my fingers and my friends have been nodding and saying “It means too much to you. You are trying to hard. You must try less hard.” And giving me lots of other similarly useful advice.
And so I did try less hard. I just blithely went to the Spar and made macaroni cheese and cut my fringe and tried not very hard to work out cross-referencing for another piece of work I was doing.
And then one day, true to the process, we all know and hate which I am trying to explain in case you think drawing is either easy or hard, I miraculously did something. I put one shape on top of another, and I drew a hyena. And then I knew it might be okay. That the cacophony of bad initial trees and agapanthus and construction sites and all the other mistakes might finally come together in a loving symphony of glorious aesthetic and conceptual union.
I told my friend who is a very good, experienced and famous artist about this. About how I had realised that however talented or talentless one was, the most important thing is just to keep going. Keep going, but don’t try to hard. A difficult and delicate balance to master at precisely the same time. And my editor said, ALUTA.
And then my wise friend said more. She said: "Even more important. There is someone you are doing this for. Your Muse. The secret person you do all your Best Things for. It is only when you feel sure your Muse will like them, that You will like them. And then nothing else will matter. Don’t show anyone else the drawings until they are done. Until the Muse, secret, absent and invisible to all of us, presently occupying all that space in your head, is pleased.
Because if you show too many people, then someone else will say: Cool in that ambiguous way, while you stare at them for some sort of truth in their body language. Or something like. “I don’t like that fire, or the polar bear. Or why is there a floating hyena in the sky. And you won't be ready to shrug it off and know what belongs to them and what to you. What is flattery and whether it is actually a bad drawing in their view and what is envy and what matters and what does not.
And you won’t necessarily be ready or have the precise words to explain to them just how scared you are of Gerard Bonneville. Of the way he was whacking his three-legged hyena daemon against the wall in La Belle Sauvage, and so that is probably why you had to include him in the picture. And you might not be ready to say confidently: hyenas are terrifying laughing scavengers so they must always be visible, not secretly under the table licking their severed bloody wounded legs. Like the terrible tortured hyena soul that belongs to Gerard Bonneville. So once I’d grovelled around in the muck with him, I had to draw him.
Don’t show anyone until your Muse is happy, you have faced the hyena, and he is correctly positioned in the sky. She said these are just some of the rules of drawing. When you have grown up a bit and stopped being so attention-seeking, I will tell you some more.