Braving a New Craft

Governess Bingo Guest Post from Katy Wheatley

I am fortunate to have creative friends.

Even more so, because they are willing to try daft things like bingo games I make up for fun summers / winters, depending on where we are in the world. As I am up to my ears in crafts already, when I put out an invitation to some friends who might want to guest post for me, Katy Wheatley leapt into action to write about trying something new and creative.

Katy is already a very creative person, as a brilliant tarot reader¹ who has a house of magic that I was fortunate enough to visit last year. She allowed me to lounge on her sofa and watch endless episodes of Great British Sewing Bee and drink her tea. It was bliss.

So any craft Katy wanted to go for, I was up for the ride. Everything of hers I read makes me feel less alone and usually makes me laugh out loud, so much so that there’s snot involved. We have all been begging her for a memoir for years, and perhaps you will now join me in wishing for her book, too.

And so… let’s go on an artistic odyssey with Katy, the inner critic, Lucien Freud, and Egon Schiele, among others.

A New Craft

My wonderful friend Caroline has invented a creative bingo card to celebrate Governess season. You will not get to shout HOUSE or even BINGO unless you really want to, but you might find your creative horizons expanding exponentially and your inner peace making more than a brief pitstop in your chaotic life for a change if you have a go. I think this is way more exciting than winning £20 at Gala Bingo on a Friday night amongst a sea of ferocious women wielding dobbers. I recently had a deeply traumatic experience at bingo though, so who knows?

Caroline invited me to not only participate but to write something about what I had chosen to do. I didn’t hesitate. I suggested that I tackle the new craft square because I wanted to find a way to get back to making art, something which I stopped doing last year and which I have found many subconscious ways to avoid getting back into. In order to try something new, I suggested that I might try portraiture, which is something I am very bad at indeed, but would like to be better at.

I started by finding ways to make it as hard as possible for myself to pick up a pencil. Life has been very stressful in recent months and in theory you would think I would jump at the chance to calm the fuck down and soothe my frazzled brain. Unfortunately my brain had other ideas which involved some archaic belief that I need to prove how stressful my life is by staying permanently stressed. I made a complex matrix of subcategories and rules which meant that not only did I now not want to draw, I could be extra stressed about the fact I was stressing myself out unnecessarily. What a piece of work is man, etc.

I decided that I had to draw my own face (which I do not like to look at), and that I had to draw it every day for a week or I would not be doing it right. Hence it being better not to do it at all. The days ticked by and I got more and more screwed up about it until yesterday I decided to tell Caroline that I could not do this thing, which I had volunteered for. I could not do it because I was a terrible person who had been put on this earth solely to let herself and everyone else down by failing to realise a late life career as Lucien Freud.

Then I went away and scrubbed my bathroom, which is something I bet Lucien Freud never did but which gave me a great deal of perspective on my current levels of insanity. I decided to stop getting in my own way and make it easy for myself to do something I love without imploding. Don’t deep it, as my children wisely say to me.

I decided not to draw myself. I decided to choose an artist/painting I like and have a go at copying it. I wisely plumped for Egon Schiele, whose human figures are weird looking and who didn’t have a lot of truck with rubbing out his lines, which gave me a lot of leeway re; making a bit of a hash of things. I also decided to choose a work where he painted the figure from behind so that I didn’t have to stress out about symmetry or noses. The more you look at a nose, the freakier it gets, trust me.

The source image, free of face with a less intimidating back view.

I chose a sketchbook and pencil crayons because they were available and I didn’t have to spend an hour faffing about setting up an easel and choosing paints etc, which would have been another way of stopping myself. I picked an H pencil to sketch out the shape of the figure because it fell out the pencil case first and was sharp enough to work with. I believe it’s what Freud/Schiele would have wanted.

At first my head was full of monkey chatter. This is wrong. That’s wrong. You can’t show anyone that. You don’t have the right colours. It isn’t a perfect copy. You are a terrible artist who will be shunned by the establishment and end up living in the gutter eating scrambled egg out of a shoe etc. Even though you don’t want to be a professional artist. I kept going. I kept looking at the painting I was trying to copy. This is not as common a practice as you would think, due to all the chatter and the thinking you know what something looks like and doing that instead.

I got a lot of things wrong. I looked again. I worried it wasn’t perfect. I reminded myself what Grayson Perry said about painting and drawing. If you wanted it to be a perfect reproduction, you’d take a photo. I did not want it to be perfect. I wanted to let go of that and enjoy the process. Bugger the result.

After about ten minutes I got completely engrossed in following the lines of Schiele’s figure with my eyes, if not my pencil. The shapes he drew to make a human form are deeply strange. His figures are quite lumpy, and yet I find them beautiful. I became fascinated by the way he used colour. There is a lot of yellow in his skin tones. The green fabric isn’t really green. It has deep blue and pink running through it. He uses the green of the fabric to make marks on the skin these show bruise like depths and folds. You can see the pencil lines indicating creases, the shape of the spine and the way the torso moves. He elongates these lines outside of the figure, hooking them into the empty space of the canvas. He shows you everything. It shouldn’t work but it does.

Eventually two hours had passed and when I had finished, my brain felt calm instead of scrunched up for the first time in several days. Who knew?

The resulting drawing. (This is Caroline: VERY IMPRESSIVE, right??)

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Back to Caroline:

So many thanks to Katy for sharing this piece! I feel far less nervous about trying some drawing having read it.

You can get more writing from Katy here:
Substack:: Shenanigans and Stuff
Tarot readings:: Odd Good Life

1. Katy is my personal tarot reader and I cannot recommend her highly enough. If you need someone to read for your characters, I can help you out, but if you want a reading for YOU, Katy is your lady.