A long post with a lot of photos Every month I start a sl...

A long post with a lot of photos Every month I start a slow drawing. Making abstract outlines and then filling them in every day. It’s a form of diary, meditation, and drawing exercise. I think about something, close my eyes and rapidly draw the impression of what I will be drawing for the month. As the days pass, I fill in a section or two, building up the drawing. I’m not just colouring in the spaces. I often change the outlines a little or ignore them. I blend colours, sometimes overlaying several shades over the space of a few days, shading them, filling in details, or making them stand out. This month’s drawing is an image of where I live in Northern Cyprus. The blue Mediterranean Sea is in the foreground and comes up to the sandy beaches and the green levels where I live. The land rises up into green hills and farther up into the mountains. There is a peculiarity to the geology here. Unlike the Troodos Mountains in the south, the Kyrenia range is not volcanic. These mountains were formed by the crashing of two tectonic plates. They are limestone and marble, which were slowly solidified from layers laid down in ancient sea beds, which were then pushed into vertical mountains. You can see the vertical striations when looking at the mountains. The mountains have the curious characteristic of splitting, like icebergs calving off an ice shelf. Over the eons, the towering rocks move away from the parent mountain, sliding slowly downhill, while still staying upright. Some do topple, while others continue to stand tall. Some of them have broken away in sequence, making a geological string of monuments progressing down the mountainside as if they were marching to the sea. I love looking at and wandering through the landscape here, and living in my little strip that runs between the mountains and the sea.