Sketching

 

I went to see the Imperial Chinese Robes from the Forbidden City at the V&A Museum and took my sketch book. Most of these textiles have never left China. They remained in the Forbidden City stores for hundreds of years, treated as sacred and carefully tended even though the Opium and World wars, Boxer and Taiping rebellions, and the dissolution of the entire imperial system exploded around them. As soon as the emperor, empress, concubines and their children died, their clothing was taken to the stores, never to be worn again, never exposed to sunlight and the various effluvia of humanity. The collection is so enormous that it is has taken almost a century since the opening of the Forbidden City to catalog all the pieces. That’s five generations of curators dedicated to the task.

The exhibition includes a wedding gown made in 1889 when Yehe Nara Jingen married the emperor Guangxu, which took three years to make. It is richly embroidered with dragons and phoenix, on red silk, the colour for weddings: the last boy emperor Pu Yi recalled that when he married in 1922, two years before he was expelled from the Forbidden City, the bridal chamber “looked like a melted red wax candle”.

The garments followed a strict hierarchy: bright yellow for the emperor, apricot yellow for his sons, Siberian sable only for the imperial family, pale blue for moon ceremonies, padded robes embroidered with narrow rows of gold to look like metal armour for travelling with an entourage of 3,000 people, 6,000 horses and 1,000 boats. Ordinary Chinese people could never have afforded the sumptuous dragon embroideries, but were in any case forbidden by law to use them.

I found the whole exhibition fascinating and would love to have gone back again but the exhibition ended the the next day. Keeping a visual record of what I've seen is becoming more and more important to me. I like that I now have more confidence in my drawing abilities and feel able to make a little sketch instead of taking a photo when I want to remember something. It feels more meaningful than simply taking a snapshot with a camera. You really have to look and explore your subject as you make your marks on the paper. You also have to be quick as there's never much time and you are forced to make quick decisions about what it is that you find interesting and try to convey that in the sketch. Having said that, drawing can be very intuitive and there's something great about just losing yourself in the act of painting or drawing. It's as if the whole world just melts away and you focus only on creating an image.  I'm learning to be happy with what I've made instead of always looking at how it could be improved and that's quite a significant shift for me.