The only thing that is constant is change

On the twentieth anniversary of my mother’s death I ponder on why I keep drawing my breakfast

Appetite conquers art — I always drink my cappuccino before painting it © TamsinHickson

The subject matter doesn’t vary much-one thing at least in common with my art hero Morandi ©TamsinHickson

My mother was fast moving. She needed very little sleep and rarely ate breakfast; although I’ve inherited some of her speed I like to linger in the mornings. We moved to Italy a year after she died and when the confusion of the concatenation of these two events began to clear I looked for a way to record the days before they rushed past in an endless flurry. Drawing seemed the obvious answer, but what? The quietest time in my week was weekend breakfasts…and so my breakfast drawings began.

Aldo has the Gazzetta dello Sport to console him ©TamsinHickson

The habit stuck through meeting Aldo and converting him to the sitting at table for breakfast in the bar (only tourists and the very old sit down for breakfast in our part of Italy); through the opening and closing of one bar after another in our small town. I draw my breakfast in bars by the seaside, on holiday and on visits to both sons at university.

Expanding my subject matter from breakfast to men over a certain age ©TamsinHickson

Looking through these images of empty cups and crumbs I think of how my parents’ lives worked out. My mother escaped old age, dying before four of her six grandchildren were born, whereas my father is now so old I can’t remember how he used to be; most days he is vaguely surprised to discover that he has any grandchildren at all. In the last year I’ve used drawing as a way of spending time with him, as conversation between us has dwindled along with his memory. Reading Alan Watts is comforting.

“What happens is neither automatic nor arbitrary: it just happens, and all happenings are mutually interdependent in a way that seems unbelievably harmonious. Every this goes with every that. Without others there is no self, and without somewhere else there is no here, so that — in this sense — self is other and here is there.” Alan Watts The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are (public library)

A rare painting of breakfast at home, where dogs wanting walks and cats filing complaints interrupt the creative moment ©TamsinHickson

Perhaps my love of cave paintings best reveals why I draw my breakfast — each sketch is a statement of presence bringing with it a thread of memory, the faint scent of coffee and the recollection of the small explosion of pleasure brought by biting into an almond brioche.

The football news is so gripping he’s forgotten his brioche ©TamsinHickson

And that is enough.

©TamsinHickson