My Christmas gift to myself this year was starting a drawing after well over a year of inactivity on that front. I wrote at length on this blog about some of the reasons I didn’t want to create visual art in the last year, and in my last post, about why I felt compelled to destroy a bunch of works on paper and even a few works on canvas of mine in response to grief and anger. But something has started to shift in the last week and I’ve been thinking about different drawing projects I’d like to explore, which I thought of as a good sign. I am not one to offer advice about what it takes to make the will to create art suddenly manifest, as someone asked me just today, as I’m afraid I completely lack discipline on that front and when the inspiration isn’t there, I find there is very little point in forcing it. I just ride the wave when it comes, and when it recedes again, I focus on other creative outlets, or simply on keeping myself afloat until the creative muse comes visiting again.

This series of abstract drawings I’m working on is called Connectivity. The completed one shown below is Connectivity 6 from a few years ago. Almost all the others were destroyed, but this one somehow survived, and seeing it again after posting about it yesterday made me want to explore this project again. The newly started one has about an hour’s work on it so far.

These are meditative works, completely unplanned, using only Sakura Micron pens on paper, in this case a Moleskine A3 sketchbook. No rulers. No drafts. Just ink, breath, and trust. The point is I can work on them when I am out of ideas and not up to the challenge of “being creative” or doing figurative work. All I have to do is concentrate on putting down one dot and hand-drawn circle at a time.

It occurs to me that having destroyed the previous ones was a way of relinquishing attachment, much like the Tibetan Buddhist practice of creating intricate sand mandalas in ceremony and then intentionally dismantling them in what is called a mandala dissolution ritual — the destruction becomes part of the ritual, not a negation of it. (Here’s a short video showing how sand mandalas are created and respectfully dissolved in practice.)

I was also struck by a comment someone left on social media when I posted Connectivity 6. They assumed I’d used a computer to make it. That, to me, is both an insult and an unintended compliment — proof of how precise and obsessive these drawings can be, but also a reminder of how easily hand work is erased or dismissed in the age of digital precision.

I’m listening to Erik Satie’s Gnossiennes and Gymnopédies on repeat along with other classic piano pieces by composers such as Chopin, Bach and Philip Glass (Opening is a favourite) while working on this — a perfect match for the quiet focus this series demands.

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• A Christmas gift to myself
• A few of the drawings I destroyed this year
• THE AKATHISIA FILES: PT 5
• THE AKATHISIA FILES: PT 4
• “I like rocks.”