I am taking an extended break from knitting and have pacified my knitting buddies by drawing hand-knitted seasonal soft toys as a record of Christmas 2024. I can turn to my sketchbook and remember our autumn meetings together in a corner of the pub - although I haven't attempted real people yet.
I have a new topic: small utensils. For the last couple of days I have been sketching odd items from the kitchen drawer. These have been in our family for several generations and are the kind of bric-a-brac seen in a local antique shop causing you to exclaim that they seem familiar or regret that they were too easily disposed of in the last century.
So far I have attempted a porcelain pipe for pastry pies - to let the steam out; an apple corer, an old fashioned potato peeler, a knife-sharpener that designates itself 'loyal services' with a patent number I am unable to decipher; a pastry wheel for decoration and prinking crusts; an ornamental three-pronged fork - EPNS because my family could not regularly afford sterling silver; nutcrackers and a 'pusher' which would be given to a weaned infant to encourage them to manipulate solid food.
These objects charm me by their solidity, their fitness for purpose as they sit comfortably in my palm, their craftsmanship and their ornamentation which I discover every time I attempt to draw accurately, according to the book, what I see and not what I think I see. Even the EPNS fork and the 'pusher' have delicate art nouveau patterns on their handles which is very difficult to reproduce in two dimensions.
The challenge of still life, according to the art book, is to position them together, having mastered them individually, and assign significance through their relation to each other. The other really hard aspect is to learn to draw the spaces in between them.
That will require some thought. So before I embark, in homage to my family and Christmas past, I will attempt the coffee spoons, still in their original case; a present from Coronation Year with all the challenges of light on metal and the folded material in which they sit.
