Etch, Sketch, Make - Just Make.

Meeting a hero and joining the lineage

The Adoration of the Shepherds: A Night Piece, Rembrandt, 1656

Two CDs for £15 at HMV. This was so much money to little Lydia. (It’s not an unnoticeable amount now, but it’s something quite particular in a £1 pocket money per week economy.) I flip flopped between three options, needing to cut one to make use of the deal, eventually leaving with a copy of Aquarium, the debut album from Aqua, and IV by Led Zeppelin. I was delighted. I felt part of something invisible, important and dispersed.

I was ten or eleven or so when my parents took me to my first stadium concert. Preparations included a trip to Windsors World of Shoes and the purchase of a pair of denim-covered platforms, embellished with neon, stitched flowers and silver sequins. I could only just walk in them and I felt amazing. Squeezed between warm and flailing bodies, sugar sweet pop melodies sent the crowd wild and the collective euphoria is something I can still close my eyes and summon. This was my first experience of wild, unselfconscious, free-reigning fandom.

A love for visual art generally makes less noise. It already had me by the time I was wearing the denim platforms, but I might not have been so quick to tell you about it. Does it grow more slowly? Is it harder to talk about? Is it about the fanbase rarely being together to get giddy in one place?

I really clearly remember finding Rembrandt’s etchings, years after his paintings. I went through a phase, that I think a lot of artists do, of copying established artists’ work as best I could. Trying to understand their processes; their line, shape, form, approach, colour mixing, paint application, pencil pressure. And why they would do that, as opposed to any other way. I copied a lot of Rembrandt’s paintings, particularly self portraits, as a teenager and got good grades. Some of my best. But I also quietly copied some of his etchings as sketches - I found them to be such vulnerable and delicate things. Those purposeful and meandering lines. Lots of open space. His well known, brave use of light and dark. They felt so tender. Tender in the bold and resilient kind of way. Like witnessing someone’s wandering through unknown space toward somewhere they intuit. One sketch in particular had me at the kitchen table for hours and hours. Half my life later, I’m walking into the city feeling like I’m about to meet one of my heroes.

If the paintings are the stadium tour, Rembrandt’s etchings are the intimate gig in the well loved local venue. Full of those trips and trills that only happen on stage, and never the album. Standing in front of his palm-sized microcosms, I felt like I was meeting the man. They felt closer to his hands, and his heart, somehow. Etching is a slow and intentional process, but they read with the energy of drawing. Crafted and truthful. Marks in the wrong place, intelligent details, all pointing to the person, his surroundings and the future simultaneously. It sounds so incredibly obvious, but to see the images right there was to be confronted with the existence of this human; his imagination, his process and his realities. There is his signature. He scrawled it himself in 1642. The lineage of people creating goes back to 1642. (It goes back so very much further, but the lineage is so long and complex it can help to land on just one, tangible spot for a moment, can’t it?) I’m surprised that I find myself tearful.

What does quiet fandom mean when it comes to protecting the art form? Does it feel incongruent to yell for quiet things? There’s historic president for yelling to protect the basis much visual art; equality, liberty, peace. But the need to yell for the right to make - with support, with value, in the ways we need to, in the places we need to- is new and particular. My instincts point towards the medium being the message, as Marshall McLuhan might’ve said. That the noisy quiet of a visual archive as long as human history - as complex, diverse, horrifying and beautiful as human existence - speaks all it needs to, to anyone brave enough to look. As a person who looks, closely and joyfully, I sometimes wonder what would prevent some from leaning in. To be specific, I wonder why budget holders and power wielders are choosing to strangle it. Then I remember I’m not afraid of art’s danger. But there is plenty of reason for others to be. I’m certain Rembrandt knew this. I’m certain it’s a knowing in the belly of anyone who makes. Not an audible yell, but a hum and the outworkings of its resonance.