quare id faciam?

Habit (re)forming – cont.

Jeff Fisher, whose site I recommended a few posts ago, suggested to me a couple of weeks back that we try drawing together on a regular basis. This invitation has been something of a jump-start to actual activity, where the return to maintaining a place for drawing among my habits (introduced briefly below) is concerned. I'd been thinking about how to get a start; in fact taking up this blogging about a month ago was a step that I thought might develop toward some sort of renewed graphic creativity. But I hadn't expected or thought of initiating something so straightforward as time set aside each week to do a little sketch-work with Jeff. Now it seems like the obvious thing to do, and I'm very grateful he's taken the lead.

We can both use it. I simply need to move from thinking about drawing to actually doing it again. Jeff is already drawing frequently, of course, but he needs (if I may presume to account for him here) more occasion for raw, undirected drawing than he's been getting for a while.

So we managed to get in a first session today. We're going to try to manage early morning time-slots, in part just because we both have a degree of freedom for it, being self-employed. I showed up at his door at 7:45, a little late. Of course, Jeff was still in bed – I'd forgotten to confirm for today.

It was an awkward start for me in some ways, I'll admit; but that's pretty much to be expected. Drawing, it's long been popularly understood, is a right-brain thing. Certain thinking functions have to be backgrounded, or denied their usual dominance, and others given more than usual rein – though I don't like describing what this amounts to to myself too neatly. I've got a pretty good feeling, from experience, for this mode of operating & its vagaries, and I knew I wouldn't find my way into the right state of mind right away today. Nor did I; but things still went well enough. In any case, it's sufficient to think that something's under way here, to be satisfied with this morning's effort.

Brought along an item that's made for much good exercise in past, a common art-school plastic human skull, wherewith Jeff & I soon enough both got a little start. The immediate tendency with an object like this, given a pencil & a blank piece of paper, is to treat it as something to be rendered neat, small, & isolated in the middle of an area of white space. I was conscious of the impulse, and didn't really resist: was feeling tentative, and I didn't want to find I was pushing myself. But I broke out of this fixity before too long. Dropped my 'good', softer-lead, more potentially expressive drawing pencil for the old unartistic .5mm click-pencil, switched from my set-up subject, the plastic skull, to a more inviting subject, Jeff's gorgeous young dog Loki lying (miffed, plainly, that no one wanted to play) on the floor at my feet, and managed to lose that tentativeness, imperfectly but sufficiently, for the short remainder of time. There isn't much to show for it, but what there is, you can check out by clicking on the image.

posted by paul bowman @ 9:56 PM