BBC's Andrew Marr: 'Knowing I was able to draw made me realise I was going to be OK' Drawing does for me what others find in mediation, prayer or gardening. It is my way of connecting to the world; it is not just making images but drinking in and praising what's around me,' said Andrew Marr I started writing this book about my passion for painting during the winter of 2012. Weeks after finishing it, I suffered a stroke, which nearly killed me. When I started to recover in hospital, one of my early frustrations was that I found I wanted to draw. Drawing does for me what others find in meditation, prayer or gardening. It is my way of connecting to the world; it is not just making images but drinking in and praising what's around me. Returning to the world as I did after my stroke, you look at it with fresh eyes. You want to absorb all you see. That meant being able to draw again and art aided my recovery and charted it. My drawings post stroke are different. I'll leave it to others to judge if they are better or worse. My style is looser, more confident. Having a stroke makes one see time is short. My sin as an artist has been wasting time, filling in too many dots and details, being too pernickety. I don't make any great claims for the drawings other than they show me coming alive again. That makes them a victory of sorts. Knowing I could draw made me realise I would be OK. Setting counts. Without it this is just trees on a sandy shoreline. But this is where the Athenians and their allies defeated the much-larger Persian Army: the first great victory of democracy I had an art therapist at Charing Cross Hospital, in London. I am not very good at drawing out of my head, I have to see things. But I didn't want to invade other people's privacy by drawing them while they were recovering. So my therapist took photos of me when I was learning to walk again and for me to use as the basis for drawings. It was a pretty dreadful time and one of the images is a drawing of pure stress as much as anything else. Returning to drawing has been physically difficult. It's made me realise drawing is two-handed. You need your non-dominant hand to hold down the paper, sharpen pencils, and support the hand that is drawing the line. My left hand has, sadly, been useless. That means that oil painting is out of the question, though I am desperate to get back and view that as the real test of my recovery. TERRIBLE MAN, TERRIBLE STATUE: 'This monstrous statue of Genghis Khan broods over the miles of steppe in Mongolia. It was built from steel by the Chinese for a local politician and is the best case in the world I know for 'bigger than' not being 'better than'. Simply scaling up a second-rate or clumsy image makes it worse, not better! Working in oils is a physical job. You hold your palette with one hand, mix and paint with the other, take the tops off and on tubes, handle your linseed and turpentine. And of course you need to be able to put up your easel and fix it. This gives me a goal in my physiotherapy. It's my intention to paint down in Devon or up in Scotland next summer. My output has been plain: pencil drawings in my garden and in Queen Square by the National Neurological Hospital in London. They are of trees, buildings and people walking around, but they celebrate the world around me. The urgency to do that grows with a stroke and the ability to do it does wonders for your mental health. My art therapist told me many recovering stroke survivors found art essential, producing drawings and paintings of a high quality they never thought they could make before they became ill. My only point is that the making of art seems to be a deeper urge or instinct than perhaps we assume in our ordinary lives. I certainly didn't feel that I was myself properly until I found myself drawing again. As well as struggling to draw at first, I couldn't type, but discovered effective voice recognition software. Technology jumps ahead by leaps and bounds these days, but there is, so far, no system of voice-recognition drawing. I am, however, able to use my iPad, which I've had for about three years. Unfortunately, because I had not used it since the stroke, I had forgotten my password and tried to get back into it and the iPad wiped out everything that was on it, including all my drawings. I had emailed myself a few while I was drawing so I have not lost everything, but three or fours years" stuff is gone. It's disabled itself, gone back to its factory settings. It's been a small but significant personal disaster. While there isn't a single drawing here I would regard as a work of art, I think most will encourage people to try for themselves. Above all, I hope it will persuade you, whether you draw or not, to pick up a pencil and face the horrifying blankness of a sheet of A4. And then plunge ahead... SINCE THE STROKE: 'My output is mainly pencil drawings in my garden and in Queen Square, by the National Neurological Hospital. Trees, buildings and people walking around... they celebrate the world around me Drawing makes me happy, and as I get older I get more interested in impulses, and in what makes us happier. So like millions of others I draw. Scribble, scribble, scribble. Faces, trees, buildings, streets. Up to now, drawing has been my private space and has been since childhood. One way or another, I draw most days, even if it's a doodle on a newspaper; most weeks there are pictures which took an hour or more. They used to be drawn in diaries, or whatever paper was handiest. Now they are often on my iPad. In a good year, there will be a week or two when I can get out into the open air with a grimy bag full of oil paints and a canvas, or piece of wood, and make a bigger picture. Then, I am at my happiest. There will be problems ahead. A gust of wind overturns the sticky, paint-loaded canvas and carries it jam-side down onto a patch of mud. Flies attach themselves to my clouds, expiring in Flake White. Rain spatters. I huddle under a tree. There will be personal failures. I'll spend too much time struggling with some detail and it will end up a dibbydabby incoherence. Or slowly it will become all too apparent that my original drawing, the structure of the picture, is simply not strong enough. It must be thrown away. DASHED OFF: 'A swiftly sketched Nelson's Column; better monumental art than the Genghis Khan' Meanwhile, however, time's arrow seems to have been frozen in mid-air. The boil and bubble of agendas, to-do lists, deadlines, unanswered emails, meetings to be arranged, shopping lists - the press of the hours and minutes we all feel - vanishes. The Things That Must Be Done wander off for a while and stand grunting quietly under a tree while I look, and draw, and mix, and brush, and look and mix, and look... I've lost count of the number of times that my arms seem to have turned hot red with sunburn, and I simply hadn't noticed. Once the light has changed too much, or the picture seems to have finished itself, I'll wipe brushes, screw the tops back onto the tubes, try to clean the palette and carry everything home again. I will walk back, sometimes with a sketchpad and bag of pencils, sometimes with an oily canvas sack and a sticky board. Any good? Have I learnt something? Even if the answer is no - and the answer is only clear an hour later, when I've gone back to look at the picture - I am completely happy. Charity dos apart, my pictures aren't for sale (or probably saleable) and I don't have any wall space left to hang them. I'm not following a school, or a teacher. I haven't had lessons since becoming a teenager. THE END: 'I rarely draw politics but this is an exception: Tony Blair looking haggard and at bay just before he was forced out of Downing Street' The pictures record tiny advances, probably only visible to me. With the demands of work, family and friends, I have far less time to draw and paint than I'd need if I were to really move forward. Yet like most people who draw regularly I have a distinctive hand. My quirks have barely changed in 30 years. Drawing is a bit like fishing. When he was younger my dad was a keen fisherman, and when I was a boy he would take me out on a river on the Scottish east coast, with snow whirling in the sky, or we would walk up to a Highland loch, a long hike in the summer sun, and push a rowing boat out across the peaty black water. There were days on a flat, oily-calm loch when the only things biting were midges; or when a heart racing tug on the rod was followed, a minute later, by a ping, and the sharp disappointment of a broken line. FROM MEMORY: 'These men are fishing in the Bosphorus in Istanbul. For most of the time I was drawing this, a ship was blocking the view Yet every time, laden with fishing bags, pencil boxes full of flies, a net and a gaff (for hauling our catch out of the water) we set out full of hope. This would be the day for a big one, something special to carry home. Just as you never know what you're going to catch, you never know what you are going to draw or paint. You set out with hope. This time, perhaps, it might be a spectacular breakthrough. Mostly, it'll turn out as a modest disappointment. As with fishing, the reasons for failure can be mysterious. Sometimes they are external - the wrong light, a too-strong wind, not enough time. Mostly, in painting, it is a failure of nerve - to leave alone, or to trust your eyes - and above all, the nerve to be absolutely honest, absolutely serious. Painters" self-portraits are revealing. Often, they are glaring. The mouths are downturned, the shoulders hunched, the eyes almost popping. From Rembrandt to Freud and of course Picasso himself, there are few friendly, cheerful gazes. Drawing and painting are hard work. They require full concentration - frowns, grimaces. I am lucky enough to be friendly with David Hockney and he made a watercolour of me. Normally he is the most loquacious of men. But when he's painting, his mouth is pursed, his shoulders tense and his eyes bore into you. When I draw myself (the only life subject with any patience) the results are often rather forbidding. I tried to draw myself smiling once but had to hold a grin. The result was chipmunkish . When most people are drawing or painting, under the quiet surface, there is a mental drama going on. It's a test of spirit, self-belief and of determination; every stroke, like every cast of the fisherman's fly, has a meaning. The painter, like the fisherman, can be beaten, and limp home. But they will both be back. How did it begin? With crayons at school. I went to Dundee High School, aged five. I was a bad pupil. I got bored listening. Even today I cannot sit still and listen to someone talking at me. LONELINESS: 'Nobody would confuse me with a cheery little bunny here. Deliberately bleak and ugly, this is a record of a lonely late night in a New York hotel I shuffled towards the back row of desks, where I could not be seen, and drew pictures. I drew on my jotters. I drew in the margins of schoolbooks. I drew on tiny scraps of paper. I drew on the wooden desk. I got into trouble at home for drawing on white-painted walls - low down, behind chairs, where I thought nobody would notice. When asked what I wanted for a present, I would say, "plain paper and pencils." I suspect most children start by drawing from their imaginations rather than looking. So most of it would have been the banal imaginings of a small boy - funny faces, Scottish soldiers fighting English soldiers, British soldiers fighting German soldiers, spacemen, creepy witches, fantasy cars, special big lorries. They've all gone. One drawing my parents kept shows my father, and has an interesting child's perspective. The feet and legs are huge, the rest recedes upwards in space. The next stage I remember was being given a small Dolphin Art Book about Van Gogh. I was probably eight or nine. On went a very bright light bulb. The complete excitement about the colours, textures and wildness of Van Gogh's pictures is uncontaminated, more than 40 years later. LEANING TO WALK: 'At Charing Cross Hospital, after my stroke. I felt very vulnerable and quite scared. Drawing my vulnerability helped: this was done quickly in chalk, after a photo. I'm the object in red, at the centre... wobbling My parents bought me other books - collections of pictures from art galleries, books on Monet and Manet, Seurat and Renoir. I started to save up and buy more myself. I was surrounded by drawing. Before TV and computers, there was just more of it around. Picture books were essential to entice young minds. We learned to read with drawings, from Janet And John to Babar and Dr Seuss. I only bothered to struggle with French because of the Asterix drawings by Albert Uderzo. For history, the Ladybird books had bright, well-made pictures on every right-hand page. For fun, the comics of Dundee's DC Thomson came every week - Desperate Dan, Lord Snooty - and that Scottish institution The Sunday Post with full-page strips, The Broons and Oor Wullie. We had illustrated encyclopaedias, Bibles with coloured plates and old Punch anthologies. I spent days over the drawings of [John] Leech, Phil May, [George] Armour, [HM] Bateman, Fougasse, barely noting the jokes. I believe there was a golden age of British drawing from around 1870 through to the 1930s. Mass education created a market for papers, magazines, poster adverts and cheap books and for a while photography was too grainy, expensive and slow to keep up. So fast-on the-draw merchants stepped in. As a child of the 60s, this golden age of drawing was already over. Photo-journalism was the height of fashion. Kids began to prefer the moving pictures of telly to comics. I was lucky in having parents who were interested in "proper art." When they had spare money, they might buy a picture by a Scottish painter to put on the wall. I would be taken every year to the annual exhibition of the Royal Scottish Academy. It was a family ritual. We'd go round, room by room, giving verdicts on who was on form, who had become repetitive, and discussing the exciting new names. A BRONZE OF LAOCOON, ROYAL ACADEMY, 2012: 'The old academic system of learning to draw by copying casts and statues has almost vanished. But if you really want to understand something, drawing is a great way to start. This was at the Royal Academy's exhibition of bronze sculptures' Also, painting was something done by normal people all around us. The most popular artist in Dundee was the meticulous landscape painter James McIntosh Patrick, whose pictures of Angus and Perthshire capture the shapes and colours of east coast Scotland like nothing else, and now sell for a small fortune. I would cycle the country roads and sometimes see "old Mackie P" sitting in the open back of his estate car, easel out, working away. By the time I went to boarding school, at nine, painting was a private place where I could escape dreary Latin conjugation, cricket practice or lectures from retired admirals and alarming Kirk ministers. I remember a snowy day, in the village of Inveresk, perished with cold at the side of a wood and stream, sure I was Monet reincarnated. My housemaster let me paint a huge mural in a corridor. It was of knights and used lots of bright pink and blue and, mercifully, disappeared long ago. Our eccentric, determined and brilliant art teacher - Artie Baxter - suggested Edinburgh College of Art, perhaps the best in Britain then. I went to university instead. It may have been a mistake. Painting and drawing, however, stayed with me. I did cartoons for university newspapers and left-wing magazines. I sketched friends and doodled in notebooks. I started work as a newspaper journalist, but as I got older, the urge became stronger, not weaker. It is no longer just a "an escape." I want to understand more clearly what I have spent so much time doing. Perhaps if I were younger and sillier, I'd start all over again and hope to get to a place like the Royal College of Art, not to have a career, but to be a more interesting - that is, more interested - human being. This is an edited extract taken from "A Short Book About Drawing" by Andrew Marr, published by Quadrille on October 10, £15. To order your copy at the special price of £13.50 with free p&p call the Event Bookstore on 0844 472 4157 or go to mailbookshop.co.uk. Andrew Marr will be supporting "The Big Draw" with a talk and book signing at Charing Cross Hospital on October 29 at 6.30pm