Daily drawing 7-9-2019: Quince blossom. Dip pen and Sennelier sepia ink
This is what I wrote about it at the time:
There were five quince trees in the orchard, all in a row. Of all the trees, there was only one where the blossoms were anywhere near open. They come in a kind of ice cream cone shape, spiralled up into a soft whipped white point, pink-tipped. There was one single open blossom on one of the trees. It was the very beginning of the particular quinceish phase of Spring right there and then. Like the very very beginning; not a single other flower open but that one.
After some deliberation I picked the second-most-open blossom to draw: its petals were just starting to unfurl. I felt a sacrilegious twinge at picking a fruit blossom, but last Autumn's quinces were still pungently rotting underfoot. Quinces are not a modern fruit. In the act of picking— the jar of the twig breaking— the petals sprang apart, the flower in a flash half-opened.
In drawing fruit blossoms two things happen. One is that the petals change and unfold almost before your eyes. It's like a butterfly when it's just hatched out of the chrysalis, pumping blood into its wings. The twig is drinking up the water like a thirsty animal to fuel the process. The crumpledness uncrumples. For plant-time it's massively swift, speeded up.
Another is you have to go deep, deep into the heart of the flower, into the jungle of pollen tentacles, that tiny explosive universe of bee-seduction. The quince blossom had anthers like I'd never seen before. Chunky, long, grooved. I felt like some big clumsy mammal out of my depth in insect-world.
I was using the ink I used to use when I first got into ink drawing: sepia and shellac, squid juice mixed with beetle juice, old-fashioned, and I found I was emulating the style I used to use, trying for pure accuracy, pure line, and I felt like Time was accordioning, that my self of ten years ago and my slightly more battered self of Spring 2019 were crossing over, that they were in fact the same self.
‘The force that through the green fuse drives the flower / Drives my green age.’
(The second drawing is apple blossom from 2009, the year before I started my Daily Drawing project.)
