Drawing from multiple sources, or things I do while watching TV

While I watch TV I like to make pictures with pencil. I never just watch TV. I’m not very good at that. If I try I get restless and fidgety, then irritable, and eventually end up doing something else. It’s not that I don’t like watching TV. It’s one of my favourite activities. I simply find only watching TV intolerable. That’s not so weird, is it?

To enable me to watch all the delightful TV shows and movies available at the touch of a button, I do other things. I am writing this while watching American Horror Story Season 1 (maybe some of that will leak out into this!). Sometimes I write code while watching TV. Sometimes I leaf through art books. Sometimes I do online shopping. Sometimes I draw pictures of stuff. It’s a form of mindfulness I guess. These activities don’t distract me, they actually make it easier for me to focus on what’s happening on the TV, and follow what’s going on. My brain would be somewhere else otherwise. Giving my hands and the restless ADHD half of my brain something to occupy them keeps me, at least in part, in the room. My wife is so accustomed to this that she reads any captions on the screen out loud so I don’t miss vital information. It’s all just…a thing.

So how does this form part of my artistic process? Well, most of the time it doesn’t. I find pictures that I like, and I mostly just copy them. I copy them very well, but they are just reproductions. Because I spend so much time doing, this, because I watch TV most evenings, I’m pretty good at it. But to me it provides a similar function as those mindful colouring books – it’s a helpful distraction. Sometimes it yields something that I can share or sell. Sometimes I make something that informs some other part of my creative process. If I get these outcomes then I feel very pleased, but that is not my purpose. My purpose is to relax.

Does that mean that my drawings mean less than my other works? Well, my entire creative process is, first and foremost, a means of relaxations. A form of therapy. My works develop organically, over a period of time, with little planning and no single or purposeful thought process. That does not mean they are not considered, or that they have no meaning, indeed many of my artworks are packed with meaning, in some more overtly than others. I don’t work on a single thing in a linear fashion. I work on many things at once, each can be seen as a single thread at a moment in time, but could easily bleed into and merge with other threads. Threads inform each other, some die, others are born, still more are in stasis for days, weeks, months and even years, to be thawed on some whim, often triggered by one of the other threads. It’s easier for me to think of the whole process as a single chord – a braid of interwoven threads. An ongoing process that informs and is informed by all areas of my life. Thought of this way, each individual work is not an end point, or even a stand-alone outcome, but simply an offshoot of the process, a leaf on a tree.

In this light, there is really no difference between my TV doodles and the rest of my work. They’re just another emanation. A side effect of my restless brain’s need to relax. And my brain needs to relax a lot. If it wasn’t for this fact, maybe I wouldn’t be here trying to peddle my work. The purpose has never been to make money from this. But I’ve gotta do something with all this, and if other people get pleasure from it, then that makes me happy.