Anna Chapman Parker
The nettles are all in flower: self-effacing, downward-looking threads of blooms we barely recognise as such. Nipplewort and woundwort complicate the grass. Cleavers gone to seed are threaded through everything, a weft to the warp of the upright plants, holding it all together.
Sowthistle dots yellow here and there. Flowering docks, some green some brown are rusting at their tips. The odd campion persists, all the pinker for its scarcity. Bindweed's pale gramophones call mutely to the hedge.
I sit on a low wall by the bank of the river, legs hanging toward the water, my drawing paper protesting against my elbow in the gathering breeze. The grasses here are woven with soft cream meadowsweet and white nettle-leaved bellflower, whose elongated bells hit an almost ultra-violet white, the hi white of photocopy paper. It's an oddly unsettling combination of highlights: like a fluorescent bull next to an open window.
Trying to draw plants in the wind is an invitation to accept failure, to anticipate correction, getting it wrong and adjusting your point of view as part of the point. The plant is not going to hold still; the angle of each stem will continue to shift both in relation to the vertical and to its neighbour. Persisting with the drawing involves, paradoxically, a kind of relaxing into that. It's a slippery balance of caring in the micro-moment and yet not-minding how the drawing turns out. To be true to the plant in front of me, I have to fail to record it clearly.