S.D.W.: Starting Point
As a starting point for this blog, I thought it might be interesting to introduce myself to the world, so you can get an idea of who is making the art on this site. Maybe it’s not interesting though, but it might provide more information about the work!
A quick bio: I was born in Aberdeen, Scotland, to a Scottish father and a Portuguese mother. I was raised mostly in Lisbon, Portugal. I have lived in the UK and Germany too, but have now settled back in Lisbon; I love living here.
I’m not sure I can say I ever “discovered” art. Perhaps my earliest memory is of making drawings in the living room I grew up in. This was in an apartment that belonged to two great-aunts, and in which our family spent a lot of time in, moreso than in our own apartment in the same building, on the floor above. I made drawings in this mostly formal living-room, that had a shallow, rough, dark blue, wall-to-wall carpet. There were heavy curtains, a dial-up phone, an upright piano, floor-to-ceiling shelves crammed with novels, art books, encyclopaedias.
Drawing material, which included printer paper, coloured pencils, felt-tipped pens, assorted pen nibs and ink, broken erasers and tiny sharpeners, was all kept in an elaborate writing desk. This item of furniture seemed vast to me as a child. It had a strange shape, and was carved out of exquisitely beautiful woods in geometric patterns; it was bigger than me, and when I kneeled on a chair I couldn’t see the top of it. Best of all was the portion of the writing desk that folded open to reveal an interior with seven little drawers and matching compartments, one of which could be locked with a key. Materials were all scattered throughout this interior, which to me, now, seems like a miniature neighbourhood.
I have vague recollections of first scribbles being drawings that I could get into, and of describing what I’d made to anyone who would care to listen. My aunt, a secondary school art teacher, was thrilled that I drew so enthusiastically, and offered gentle critiques and praise: try drawing your toes and your fingers now, next time add eyebrows, and what shoes is your monster wearing?
I also remember a time being fascinated by the sea, underwater worlds, teeming with life and colour in secretive, cold corners. I would draw the top of the sea at the top of the page, and we’d descend into the vast ocean, which was darker in the middle, but then would glow on the ocean floor, with caves, creatures, corals, bubbles. I remember trying to do several things with these drawings: crawling into these worlds, wishing they were real, and also, wondering how they would sound.
There was a tv in the room next door, a smaller room with a red rug on the floor, a beige sofa and a heavy mahogany wardrobe. Of course I adored watching tv, but back in the 90s, screens just didn’t have the same addictive appeal they have now. As great as those cartoons on tv were, I recall more prominently the feeling of wanting to seek solace in that cold, quiet, blue living room next door, and to return to it whenever I could.
As I grew older, I spent more time outside of that apartment, more time at school, upstairs, in my room. While I still loved drawing, I guess it somehow became more formalised, less done for myself, more part of a school curriculum. Gradually, questions surged: you love drawing and art, but what can you do with that? Become a poor artist? When it came to deciding on subjects that would chart a path towards a career, the objective was to assemble knowledge for being an architect. This would be a useful and fulfilling way to put my love of art to good use, earning vast riches in the process; this did not happen.
I focussed at school, took pride in getting good grades across the board, and headed to architecture school in Edinburgh full of ambition. For a while I loved architecture, the rigour of hand-drawing, measuring, creating worlds. But gradually, as we slowly became more digitally-dependent, and the scribbling pencil and paintbrush were both forgotten and ignored, a part of me began shutting down, and it would be years before that part of me reemerged. There was even a time when I scoffed at the rigour of observational hand drawings, when I thought paintings were so old fashioned and pointless in this new world of renderings and VR.
After Edinburgh, I wanted to experience the thrill of living in a bigger city, and London seemed to me the only option. I worked for a while in an architecture office, then enrolled at the Royal College of Art to pursue a Masters in architecture. This turned out to be one of the most traumatic two years of my creative life, where the architecture tutors were some of the most creatively frustrated bullies I’ve ever met. Personal judgments and put-downs were frequent, calling out a student answer as being “stupid” was common, work was torn from walls and scrunched up in front of you. The overriding memory I have of those years is fear, fear and loneliness.
The solace I had in my time studying architecture, was architectural theory. At Edinburgh, a lecture on Architecture and Gender totally blew my mind, and I soon was hoovering up any essay I could find that addressed sexuality and space. What fascinated me then, and what still does, is the multiple ways we’ve found to inhabit, control, escape into, erase, make visible and alter the built environment to ascribe our identity onto it, and to see ourselves reflected in it. In particular, I love thinking about the ways we are in an endless feedback loop with the spaces we inhabit, how they become our mirrors.
I look back on my time as an architect and focus on the skills and capacities for critical thinking I learnt while on the job, and I mostly roll my eyes in disbelief at almost all the rest of it. I also worked as an architect in Germany, where endless bureaucracy and staid design almost shut me down creatively, before moving back to Lisbon and setting up my own architecture studio.
After several tiny projects, an apartment renovation that took forever, a drawn-out divorce process, and the sudden death of my art-teacher aunt, I was drained and sad. Why was I feeling so down and unmotivated all the time? Why did my plans for the future seem so dull to me? Why wasn’t I chasing potential clients? Realising I wasn’t well, I started therapy, and slowly I started asking myself the difficult questions I’d avoided for too long. These questioned revolved around purpose and intent, and could be reduced to what was I doing with my life, and why?
It dawned on me that I’d missed drawing and painting desperately. When I looked back on what made me happiest, it was always drawing and painting that were the constants. I enrolled in a part-time life-drawing course, and within the first few sessions, I was holding back tears of relief and joy. I gradually began to revisit the eye-mind-hand-paper connection, began to reevaluate the magic of seeing something emerge out of nothing on a sheet of paper, and started observing myself in a new light too.
I sought out classes on classical realism and figurative drawing methods, and also enrolled in a summer course at the Barcelona Academy of Art. The rigour of classical training is very attractive to me, and useful too in training the eye and practicing paying attention to surroundings.
So now that I’ve rediscovered my passion for drawing and painting, I am practicing seeing and making as often as I can, creating and discovering worlds that I can inhabit, escape into, emerge from anew.
Thank you for reading this far! Let me know your story too in the comments below!