About the Pneumonia Drawings

We didn't really see it coming but Covid came with a vengeance. In December 2019  I couldn't shake off a cough and then came a diagnosis of Pleurisy until a phone call from my doctor to say I had Pneumonia. Even then Covid was hardly considered, although later on my doctor said he thought it had been Covid.

Below is what I wrote a some time after the drawings were finished:

I’m not overly fond of winter, but I do like leafless trees, their stark forms can be seen and seen past.

There is a lot of darkness, as I write it’s just two days to the Winter Solstice on the 22 December. I for one, will count every extra little bit of light added to each day after that.

I’ve been pretty much out of action for eight weeks. Pneumonia seemed to sneak up on me without a lot of warning. It’s a debilitating illness. I guess ill people are called patients because they have to be patient. Some things will just not be rushed, recovery from Pneumonia is one of those things.

I’ve wrapped up warm in the middle of some nights and gone into the dark of the garden. The eight-hundred-year-old church across from the garden is lit for most of the night and is more visible through the bare trees than in other seasons. I like the borrowed landscape across what was the Glebe field.

This darkness is both a blanket and a parachute to soften the feeling of falling off the world.

It’s an odd feeling to put pen to empty paper without a clue as to where it will take you. Hours spent on a drawing, paused when tiredness dictated rest so that some drawings spread over several days. It didn’t matter when I started or finished.

In a way pneumonia was a gift of time, if I wasn’t drawing, I couldn’t be doing many other activities.