drawanyway.com

Things Fall Apart by Martin Symons

I guess our parents just hammered the lesson home a little too firmly: we don’t draw on walls. Well, of course we don’t. It costs money to paint and decorate, so naturally we want it to stay nice. Here’s a question, though: could it look that little bit nicer, and more individual too, if you just allowed yourself a bit of a free rein on one portion of your walls?

It took me a very long time to realise that - wait a minute, this house is mine! I can do exactly what I like with it, and that includes a bit of doodling on the paintwork if I feel so inclined. But now I come to think of it, I have a bit of a history in this area, even going back to the time when I was in rented accommodation, and before that, in my parents’ house where those prohibitive rules were first learned.

In my teenage bedroom, I mounted corrugated cardboard to the walls in panels, and made huge collages out of pictures torn from magazines: anything that caught my eye. I suppose my inspiration must have been Joe Orton: his bedsit decor was a major part of the movie Prick Up Your Ears, even, if memory serves, providing a surface for his blood to splatter against during his brutal murder. Hmm, brutal murder. Not always a good theme for interior design.

One good thing about that mode of decoration, though, is that it could be easily removed and carried from place to place, and that collage followed me through several homes, growing all the while.

I also distinctly remember decorating my dado rails with fancy gold designs after a visit to the Brighton Pavilion, the richly ornate interiors of which clearly turned my head. This hardly counts as drawing on the walls, though, as while being slightly offbeat, it still fell firmly in the domain of decor rather than anarchy.

A recent visit to the local Phoenix Art Gallery reminded me of the possibilities of this sort of freedom. Currently mounted unassumingly in their corridors are several very large pieces of paper, absolutely covered in felt-pen drawings. The image above is one of the panels - it’s the only image I could find online, and unfortnately it does not show the full effect very clearly, but believe me, it’s impressive. Faces, characters from children’s TV programmes, and everyday objects such as telephones have been skillfully sketched and coloured in, with the whole pulled together with a scheme of vertical lines covering the spaces in between. My first thought was that this would make fantastic wallpaper; my second: Who needs wallpaper? Just let me get at the pens. A few minutes each night while I’m watching TV, and bingo - I could have a wall finished inside a few months. A coat of varnish would keep it from running.

OK, so I haven’t actually started scribbling yet. For one thing, if I do, how do I teach my daughter than lesson that all parents teach their kids, about not drawing on the walls? And, now I come to think about it, do I want to?

PS, if you’re nervous, there are more acceptable ways to have fun drawing on your walls. How about painting one wall with blackboard paint?