I Live Here Now

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Oddly enough this painting is one of the few things that binds me with obstinate allegiance not only to my house but to my room, here in Glasgow. Nadia, me, my children — to and fro and round about with the person opposite and the person by your side and then moving as a four, on to the next line.

I found this flat deeply reassuring when I lived in Moscow as a student, and loved the many times when we sat about until it was late and they said to stay the night, and made up the narrow hard bed in the far room under the shelves of Mandelstam and Gumilev, where I slept and dreamed much more deeply than at our student hostel, anticipating the languorous next day of slowly getting up and drinking tea, and more and more conversation. She too has had a reunion of long parted family members from different countries in a rented French house cancelled. It was fascinating reading about Liza’s practice and I’m very grateful to her for her descriptions of her drawing process.Especially when leaving on a journey, looking back into my room, the waiting shelves of books, as I picked up my bag to leave it. I make drawing after drawing, sometimes by eye, but mostly trying to measure it, and it continues to elude me. I wanted to photograph this procession of figures as they passed across the wall, so certain and elegant in outline, so removed from the actual, more awkward and garishly painted bodies who had given them life. I Live Here Now was the title of my book of drawings and writing about living, walking and looking in Moscow, London and Glasgow, published in 2008.

After an hour people who were trying to get to their houses on the wrong part of the street were informed that their homes were now in the “sterile zone” and they would not be allowed in for several hours more. The pages weren’t always dry when I turned them to begin a new drawing but I accepted this as part of the process and the blurring and spread of the media seemed to capture the insubstantial quality of objects at dusk and replicate the feeling of rain/wind during the walks. Yet it seems that only a complete surrender to the experience of these specific surfaces permits the displacement into other cities and other spaces that we crave. And Masha’s father, who all his life longed for a “ royale”, a real grand piano, plays music into the empty rooms of the flat.At home I began the difficult process of removing the berries from their thorny branches to stew for jam. She has exhibited in London, Scotland and Paris, and published a book of writing and drawings about walking in cities, I Live Here Now . I think it is the best bench in the space, and feel surprised and grateful that it has been left waiting for me. Walking the streets below after the first night of high winds, I noticed that the pavement was full of small green lumps, rounded shapes of soft springy moss, smaller and larger, like a processing army peopling the paving stones.

Oblepikha in Russian, also known as Sea Buckthorn, or Sanddorn in German, is overlooked by Scottish foragers. I began to draw during a regular walk to the cliff top near my home, usually at the end of the day as it moved towards dusk. I looked down at where she was digging and noticed that the tarmac next to her was bulging and cracking as small buckthorn saplings forced their way up through the road, splintering the surface. My walking drawings are a record of a sensory and visual experience; how I view the world as I move through the landscape, drawing myself through a space.

A last long segment of orange light fans out towards me across the leafy floor, and then that too is eclipsed.

A measured voice, careful and without cliché in his choice of words, his narration of this particular story, and a voice in which I hear echoes of my earliest love and attention, no matter if I must now share it with millions of other people listening. A lonely turn of the century room with a woman inside it — painted by Bonnard, or told by Jean Rhys. The doors were opened wide on the small back garden and the sky above the helipad of the vast complex opposite was dense with rain that fell as a fine curtain and then more furiously as we played towards the distant figures in chairs and wheelchairs, looking out. Advertising cookies help us monitor the effectiveness of our recruitment campaigns as well as enabling advertising to be tailored to you through retargeting advertising services. The shadows of the people were cut at a diagonal beneath their shoulders, as if going down a cardboard valley.Masha’s brothers have left the country, one to Israel and the other just a few weeks ago, leaving behind his job, wife and children and crossing to Georgia via Armenia. The sun shines through the square of her yellow sun hat and makes it liquid, a translucent golden blur.