Leya Tess - John Busby Seabird Drawing Course 2023 Bursary Report
Five days into the John Busby Drawing Week, I finally found my stride.
An 8‑hour flight, two ferries, two busses and one-to-many trains brought me from my home in British Columbia to St Abbs Head. I clutched a borrowed golf umbrella as a gust of wind threatened to steal my drawing board from my lap. Peering through a scope, I watched a trio of Gannets rearrange their wings. “Scapulars! Secondaries! Primaries! Coverts!” lyrics from the previous day’s anatomy lesson played on repeat in my head. Drawing an unfamiliar bird in an unfamiliar landscape for the first time is like learning a foreign pictorial language — one in which every angle is the stroke of a unique character. Each moment created a new opportunity to either a) discover the poetry of a new mark or b) get bogged down by the infinite detail of living, breathing, and constantly shifting natural world.
Scanning the cliffside around me, a scattered group of artists in soggy woollens and waterproofs hunched over their work. Settled into the rhythm of meditative mark-making, everyone was in deep concentration, and few words competed with the cacophony of seabird calls. It was in that moment, I felt an enormous sense of belonging. I had somehow come to feel at home among this flock of strangers. Drawing is so often a solitary process — to be able to quietly share the experience of keenly looking, watching, witnessing, and translating the dynamism of coastal ecosystems was affirming.
I had ebbed and flooded between illuminated inspiration and frozen frustration earlier in the week. Evening conversations, quiet moments of reflection and dedicated hours of experimentation helped me overcome my initial apprehensions. On that final afternoon at St Abbs head, I moved away from forced attempts of representation and into a feeling of reverence for the process of looking.
Sincere thanks to the SWLA, Kittie Jones, Darren Woodhead and Nik Pollard for facilitating this rewarding experience.
