Daily Drawing

In which I'm still spreading the gospel of journaling but with a difference

At some point last year I began making a single drawing in my journal every day. (I also noticed that when I wasn’t drawing flowers or the trees outside my kitchen window, I was drawing the bottles whose contents I had consumed the previous night.)

I had been in the habit of keeping a daily journal for decades but during the pandemic someone mentioned that I ought to read The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. My friend said that I would find the book a bit corny but also useful. He was right. What I found useful was Cameron’s recommendation that you write your “morning pages” and that each week (do I remember this right?) keep an “artist’s date.” I have been following “the artist’s way” since the time we were in the middle of the pandemic. But then I started doing drawings on my morning pages, first only sketches and then this year, starting in late January, I thought I’d use color. In the beginning I used watercolor pencils before switching to regular watercolors.

I’ll admit that the paper isn’t great; it is for writing not for painting. When I want to attempt something a bit more artistic, I switch to other notebooks that have the right paper for absorbing water. Here is a self-portrait I made in March after I hurt my eye:

Anyway, what I wish to say here is that I feel more alive when I make my little drawing in the morning. One of my closest friends wrote to me: “Inside all this insanity, you are finding a new vein of attention, like the Tang poets before you. I really adore these new drawings.” I liked my friend’s mention of “attention.” It seems to me that writing and drawing are ways of paying attention to the world. Was I also painting just to remain sane? I don’t know. If I really wanted to approach what was horrible about our times, I’d be making art like the one below that I saw on social media one day:

But no. I’m usually just sitting at my breakfast table painting my damned coffee-maker. Or the bug on the lotus leaf painted on a poster I have had on a wall. It is a way of keeping a record, I suppose.

I can hear Joan Didion: “See enough and write it down, I tell myself, and then some morning when the world seems drained of wonder, some day when I am only going through the motions of doing what I am supposed to do, which is write — on that bankrupt morning I will simply open my notebook and there it will all be, a forgotten account with accumulated interest, paid passage back to the world out there…” (By the way, faces and human figures are beyond my meager talents. The first image below is an attempt to copy a drawing that I saw in the latest Granta, a portrait of Hannah Arendt by the inimitable and truly great Chantal Joffe. Talking of Granta, my editor at that magazine is married to an artist who documents with great tenderness interior spaces, particularly those inhabited by mothers and children.)

A journalist from Scroll India interviewed me recently. She said that I was a traveler, an observer, and also a writer. Then, she added that I was also, in her estimation, a painter or an artist. Would I too consider myself an artist, she asked. My answer to her was that it was true that I make at least one drawing or painting each day but I also want to insist on the viability and the dignity of being an amateur. In a world where democracy is shrinking, more and more billionaires and crony capitalism and our politicians blessing the billionaires’ beta-bahu, we have to at least keep the arts democratic. Everyone can write or paint every day. It is not necessary to be brilliant at it; instead, it can be a small, nourishing practice that enriches our lives.

One fun-fact before I end. Last year, I discovered the “5 Year Diary.” On any single page in this diary you have five separate blank slots and this means that you can make an entry for any date for five consecutive years. This is another journal that I write in daily! (When I have filled out every page for five years, I’ll have an answer in retrospect for the cliché that goes “Where do you see yourself in five years?”)

P.S. Only this morning I learned from an email sent out by Substack that an artist named Chris Schwaar has been making art on his 2025 calendar M-F to produce a record of “year in drawings.” What a neat idea!