One of the great joys of being able to visit the Candid Arts Trust in Islington is their Saturday life drawing sessions – one pose held over two 2-hour sittings. Nestled in the well lit basement studio, this allows for the kind of immersive concentration that is rarely achievable at any other time or in any other location. Its location also means that, at the half-time lunch break, I can visit Auld Hag and get a square sausage, black pudding, and tattie scone well-fired breakfast roll, and conclude my day’s sketching with a pint at The Lexington after 4pm when we disperse.

I am not a fast sketcher – I enjoy the thrill and the spontaneity of a standard life drawing class, with a variety of short and medium poses designed to train the hand to simply capture what the eye sees of the pose our models are presenting to us. I love the flow, the effort, the interaction, the rush to capture the fantastic angles and details before they disappear forever. But I also feel like I don’t ever, truly, feel satisfied with work I create there. That’s not the point – it’s an exercise, a moment, a fleeting connection.

In these long pose sessions, I should be able to actually express the kind of drawing I want to make – whatever that actually looks like. To be gifted so much time and space and concentration means I should be able to finish a drawing. Yet, as much as I enjoy these sessions, all too often I have found the additional time a challenge – as in, that I feel like I have to challenge myself to prove some point that I can actually draw. Expression is not a competition, but when I see people around me managing to complete beautiful oil paintings in an afternoon while I struggle my way around basic issues with anatomy with charcoal or pencils, I feel like I am letting the opportunity get away from me.

This month, I managed to push these thoughts aside. I put on my headphones, listened to copious Neurosis albums, had a nice coffee, stepped away whenever I felt I needed to give myself perspective, and just went along with whatever I felt like doing while our model Lily sat for us. She had a fantastic, beatific smile on her face, despite what I can only imagine is a brutal lack of blood getting to her right forearm. Heads, hands, feet and faces are the most brutal things to get right in life drawing. Complicated, fiddly, possessed of all sorts of weird bits that, if depicted even fractionally in the wrong place, can look monstrous. I felt like, for once, I had avoided inflicting this on a fantastic model. I can’t help but feel very guilty when a model comes to see what we’ve got up to, and I’ve been unable to capture them accurately. Yet I’m really happy with how Lily’s face came out here.

For once, no panic to the finish line. By the last hour, I was into shading the folds of fabric of the chair, dancing around the page if anything, trying to stop myself from embellishing beyond what was needed. Whatever finished means, this drawing, at least, is that. It is whatever it needed to be.