Try, Try Again

Yesterday I struggled with this drawing. It was a Catweazle day pretty much from beginning to end. Nothing worked.

This morning I sat down fresh and looked at it anew. Completely rubbed out what I had done and started again. Twenty minutes later I had this.

Ghandi, Megan Hitchens, 2014, charcoal, white chalk on grey paper

It was going to be more than this. His crossed legs, the books and papers. But I got this far and it was enough. No tortillion either. I quite liked the lines. It doesn't need the dreamy softness of smudging.

This is the grey paper I was using to draw Arlene. But it has tiny pink fibres in it which I didn't notice at first. They make the tone warm, no good for sanguine but perfect for black and white. It ends up being a reverse of the norm - cool, warm, cool, rather than the more usual (and easier to work) warm, cool, warm. By which I mean light, medium, dark. It's normal to have a warm light, cool midtone, warm dark, but the warm grey flips that around. Still, I think it works here.

Ghandi is one of the historical figures I greatly admire. He gave up so much for his country, he gave the world structured civil disobedience, he tried so hard to keep India together after Independence. He was a towering intellect who understood the needs of ordinary people.

I love that he gave people ideas of how they could empower themselves. Simple things like making salt and spinning and weaving their own cotton. Things that the British Empire had taken from them in order to protect English business interests and monopolies. Challenging the use of entrenched poverty as a means of political control.

The film "Ghandi" never really grabbed me. Yes, it was a good film. But I always felt that surely an Indian actor could have been cast in the role. I doubt that Ghandi himself would have been happy with an Englishman in what was little better than black face playing out the story of his life. It was the last feeble dig of English Imperialism at the man who helped to bring down the Empire.