I’m building a book of smells.
In November last year, a good friend gave me a concertina notebook and suggested we should both make a habit of drawing a flower a day. By the end of December my notebook was filled, and the habit very firmly established; but I was finding that once the drawing was done, my hand would reach for another surface to write on. There was something about observing and considering flowers that prodded memory and prompted the pouring forth of words, and somehow morphed into olfactory considerations that embraced beetroot salad and earth as well as perfumes and flora.
So when a new notebook arrived from Deep Deep Light it made perfect sense to continue the drawings, add writing on the same page and lend colour to the images (hitherto I had restricted myself to simple outlines in black ink) with their beautiful watercolours. The writing relates to scent, both actual and remembered.
I have so many memories attached to watercolours. The earliest of them had an unsettling beginning, but a kind resolution. In the 1960s my mother studied art at Caulfield Technical College (I think it’s called Swinburne these days), and one bright morning during the school holidays she dressed me up in my Sunday best, parked my young brother with our grandmother and took me off to school with her. I remember following her into a white-walled studio filled with easels and noisy chatter. The floorboards were spattered with paint. At one end there was a wooden bench. Ma told me I was to take my clothes off and sit on it. Apparently she had volunteered her eight-year old daughter as the model for the life-drawing class. I burst into tears and refused. Happily, before Ma began insisting more firmly, the lecturer intervened, saying that it would not be necessary to distress me in that way. He gave me paper, brushes, charcoal and his own watercolours and said “here, just have some fun with these”. I painted happily for an hour or so. Later he gave me one of his enamel palettes to take home, along with a charcoal sketch he had made. If they hadn’t been burned in the Ash Wednesday bushfire of 1983 I would have both still. Fred Cress was a fine artist and a good person.
Years later, as an architecture student in the days when watercolour rendering of design drawings was still a thing, I assiduously stretched huge sheets of paper, and securing them on boards with brown tape so that I could practice drawing down a perfectly even wash of colour. I don’t do that any more.
Instead I am making scruffy contour drawings (mostly) of flowers, some actually in the room with me, some imagined or remembered and occasionally from a quick photo snapped outside, if I don’t want to shorten the life of the bloom by picking it.
This relatively new daily habit is giving much satisfaction, as each scent or aroma takes me stumbling over the cobblestones down memory lane. I’m hoping that, in the event my family ever packs me off to the Shady Glades retirement home for silly old bears, somebody will kindly let me take this book with me.
Wandering in the pages (assuming I’ll still be capable of reading) should provide some solace.
Presently I’m enjoying it so much that I have made a small tutorial about it, available with my compliments (that means it’s free) at the School of Nomad Arts. I am hoping others might find it comforting to make their own book of smells, in order to be transported if they need.
You’ll find it here
and if you’re thinking of investing in those lovely watercolours but don’t feel the need for instruction, it’s still worth joining the course as it includes a 10% discount code for Deep Deep Light
Thank you for this beautiful little essay. I will hasten over to the school at once. As I'm im the creative shallows at the moment this might very well kick me out into the deep end!
PS thank you India for this precious gift. The snowdrops pushing up through the frost and snow are a joy to be captured on the first page!