From THE WAY WE LOVED by Judith Ravenscroft

It seemed to me then that I would never understand all the peculiar ambivalences, the hatred and love, the pain and grief that lay between them. It was their story, not mine – and there was some relief in that conclusion; I felt returned to myself, a free agent. But I also felt bereft, as if the veil protecting me from a full view of our reality had been cruelly snatched away.

From PAINTING: MYSTERIES & CONFESSIONS. A COLLECTION OF WRITINGS by Tess Jaray

Suddenly these new paintings are presenting me with hills, curves against a dark, or a pale sky. … I wasn’t seeking this curve – brow – of a hill. But a few months previously I had experienced it: a dark, a velvety dark night in the Umbrian hills.
And around midnight I heard a howl of a wolf from the depths of those hills.
There is a sense of repressed violence running through this harmony. Manifest by something that reverberates through the terrain, or perhaps through the air, perching on the yellowing tobacco leaves and emitting random puffs of dusty aggression. It may be generated by centuries of hardship and poverty – a desperate need for survival. But is picked up and echoes down to us. Aggression has generations as much as we do. But there is no conflict between such desperation and the rolling harmony of the landscape. It is two sides of a coin, symmetry embodied. Any painting, in order to have life, must hold those secrets in themselves. Those secrets that we all know, are part of all of us, but are rarely spoken of, because how should dark and light be spoken of in tranquillity? These are phantasmagorical longings, a desire for meaning, for order and symmetry, for tidying up. But it is rarely so neat, except in our minds.

From MY LIFE WITH BELLE by Judith Ravenscroft

On a morning walk I paused at the top of the steps leading down to the canal to take in the view. It was the darkest time of the year. Trees and tangled undergrowth, the slick of water, all continued bleak. I walked along the towpath to the next bridge, crossed the canal, and returned on the opposite side. As I reached the foot of the steep path that led back up to the road, a black-clad figure emerged from the gloom and bore down on me, pressing forward like the masthead of a noble ship. His face was blank – skin and bones, empty of personality – and he had a doomlike air. But then, as he passed, this apparition looked searchingly at me, seeking and holding my gaze.

From BYSTANDERS: HER BERLIN NOTEBOOK by Mirjam Hadar Meerschwam

A pattern formed. I wrote, she wrote back. I waited. If I hadn’t imposed my pace, we would have been dragged into this writing between us, sucked in and engulfed. Her impulse was to answer immediately. “Telling her” she called it. That's me, "her".
She was surprised at how she loved it. The patience and thoughtfulness with which I lingered, turning things this way and that, the seriousness I put into it so that the words weighed. I came across something Audre Lorde said: putting things on the line, putting one’s self on the line. In the sense too that the writing between us grew into a project of self-presentation. The line as limit but also as the thin-drawn materialization and trace of time, the fine blue horizontal along which we express ourselves putting down one mark after another. And here she was "telling me" herself – her pleasure in it, under my gaze: like a cat in the sun, like a child playing/flaunting her pliable limbs, her soft hair, her weightlessness.

From FALSE TESTIMONY: COLLECTED WRITING by Paul Becker

I was done in. So many nights untroubled by even a whiff of sleep. Every time I began to nod off, I would come to with a start, the remembered jolt of every last knock, rapping along my spine.
I managed finally, sweetfully to sink off around seven for a couple of well-deserved hours. Storms again. Even my dreams refuse to let me alone, buffeting me around like bullies. This time it’s my Granny’s house on the estuary, the end shack at Dadyanov, reeking of fish guts and engine oil. Outside the tide was surging dramatically. Movement in the foundations. The walls were quivering and the tiles were flying off the roof like flicked cards. I was lying abed, the room was swaying about as though already at sea. Apparently I had no fear of the rising tide? My dream self must have had a child’s mind, too young for the awareness of danger. I could tell the wind was just a primer, an emissary for the Great Storm, the feast of wind that was coming straight across the sea, blowing in from the east; the true hurricane that tore through the town like a runaway train.

from FIFTY DRAWINGS by Timothy Hyman

My drawing-life really began only in my twenties - that is, in the late 1960s, after I’d left the Slade. While making this selection, I’ve found I’m vividly recalling the moment when each drawing was made, and especially those early ones, nearly always fuelled by a rush of panic, an initial sense of floundering; of my utter inability to calmly build a “representation”. There are many ways of writing about Drawing that seem alien to my experience: as an “exercise”; as “analysis of form”; as “the probity of art” (Ingres’s phrase, famously set above the entrance of the liferoom at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts); as skill, or as “Discipline”. The experience of the world that I’m given is mostly too fugitive and transitory to fit any of those descriptions.
I’ve felt much closer to some of those definitions Bonnard came up with, near the end of his life, of art as “the Transcription of the Adventures of the Optic Nerve”; or as “Many Little Lies for One Big Truth”. A long-term collector of my drawings, asked to characterise them, suggested “Catching the Flow of Life”,
“a catching of phenomena in a few strokes, which is fresh and striking and may be revelatory. Here is something that seems peculiar to drawing, dependent on improvisation and speed of execution.”