Life drawing class

First to look around in furtive discovery: 80 degrees to the left, model the central pivot, a limply suspended woman emerges draped on the paper of someone who could not bring themselves to include the chair on which the model sat; 60 degrees to the right someone else draws four or five of the others in the class as they draw, cluster of people surrounding and nearly drowning out the model, and it's like the fascinated gaze at distant bird hides facing you from the darkness inside your own, looking out and in at the same time, stopping the slip into imagined invisibility. Determined denial of the situation's artificiality on my left and frenzied over-preoccupation with it on the right: ever-so-slightly closer to the latter.

Second to look at the model herself from my place, from behind and to the side of her, paper still blank, soft curve of cheek and glimpse of pleasantly perked-up nose but all blankly fading into unexpressive mouth and petering-away chin, charcoal in hand has no response, a whole body, tumbling down from the face, overwhelmingly present, sinking into chair, landing in solid flat confidence where the lower of her crossed legs settles on the floor and she had been told to leave on her shoes.

Absent minded drift of charcoal here and there around that body before settling into a close-up focus on the strong back of that lower leg and the flat of that sandal shoe.

Then a long gaze in and out of focus right at the model gradually to realise that what is being seen could only be described by cascade. The eye pours and falls in downward-curved jumps and leaps: tumbles from a hold on top of the shoulder down the loose arm, tracks back up to beautiful ray of shadow following path of arm down back, stop-gap switches to her hand on the arm of her chair where arcs of fingers point gently to the floor even while gripping tightly, and crash-culminates in up-and-down splash over three floorbound slashes where narrow leg of chair stands between shapely, crossed legs of model, and so much momentum by now that it - the gaze - springs right up to the hook on the shoulder again. And all the while the face doesn't seem to enter into it.

So now I have fixed upon this idea, this waterfall of body and chair, but the next drawing still gets caught up with areas where too much working-in pull the eye to a static, over-informed rest. I am told this by she who wanders around quietly and engages with us intensely, and instructed sternly to let go of representation, to draw the raw idea not all of this stopping and starting. There follow a couple of hesitant attempts, forehead frowning, each time absorption and frustration both growing, but then flying charcoal flowing leaves me with a piece that seems too strident and aggressive to me, but seems actually to startle this teacher of ours.

A pulse of muted exitement: she seemed held up on a string for a moment, briefly lost in the drawing, as if feeling the faint connection with a sliver of magic that means something has been captured. Well, after that response, it seemed time to leave the A2 paper and embark upon a last half hour basking in the freedom of A1. The light outside had become dimmer, but even so, the way each subtle shift of shade was standing out so strongly on that body was partly that by now I had slightly become it. Drawing some-thing/one you have entered into like that can no longer be frustrating: there is only a contented dream-state. And so ended my first experience of life drawing.

Southwold's Cathedral

Character directionally variable, through a slow circling process.

And it looks better in watercolour...

Navigation by the stars

Just as twentieth century compasses had almost completely taken my world by storm, I found that sextants, more specifically bubble sextants, were being used for celestial navigation of aircraft right until the middle of the Cold War! Yes, that's correct: navigation in aeroplanes by heavenly bodies. Here is Commander Weems demonstrating, and here also is an early 1920s example of such a device. A skilled pilot was required to keep the plane steady whilst measurements were being taken, and on early commercial flights, the pilot would turn on a special light to convey to customers his wish for them to cease their centre-of-gravity-upsetting meandering and be still for a while. This system was mainly used over sea; pre-Second World War air navigation over land involved pilots trying to follow roads and railways, looking out for the occasional inscription of a placename on a roof, and occasionally taking a brief stop at a farm to ask the way. Of course, it all got a lot more high-tech during the war when black-outs made things somewhat tricky, and an innovative fervour produced rather more swish-looking sextants, a modification of sun-compasses termed an astrocompass, gyro-stabilised distant reading repeater magnetic compasses, compasses with bomb-sights attached...