All is well when you draw. The world waits for you to catch its essence. Time pauses as you trace its contours. The universe awaits your touch in silent expectation as you consider your next drawing. Don't wait. Draw something right now. This simple act will soothe your anxious and awaiting audience.
Drawing as a Way of Understanding
When I draw any subject, I understand it better. I understand it in a visual way of course, but also in a kinetic and emotional way. I understand it in ways that cannot be said with words.
When I run my eyes over a flower and then recreate every line of it on the paper, I seem to be hearing a song sung only for that moment. When I see the flower start to appear, I understand the dance of being-ness that is the flower. Entering into the dance, I harmonize with the song, and hear its poetry.
And that is magic.
How To Draw
1. You will need something to draw with and something to draw on. Paper and pencil, chalk and sidewalk, finger and mud, brunt stick and cave wall; all these things will do.
2. Make a line.
3. Realize the this line is much more than a mark. It is a passage of time, a dance of motion, an opening into the soul. This one simple line. Is. Everything.
4. This line, that is everything, did not exist in this reality before you created it.
5. This line, this simple stroke, is the point at which the universe moved through you.
6. The universe is waiting to flow through your pencil tip in a kaleidoscopic generation of creativity.
7. Humbly make your next mark.
Images from the Deep
I was walking along the other day and I was overcome with a strong emotion and an image to go with it. (I usually don't get my image ideas that way.) I don't know what made me "see" this image or what triggered the emotion. It may have been something as obscure as the angle of the sun. The image was quite clear in my mind, though, and still is.
I experimented with the image for a while ... sketching it and trying to understand how I wanted to draw it. Then, when my computer was on the blink for a few days, I got all my photographs organized. That was amazing by itself ... but even more amazing was that I found an image in those photos that matched my mental image very closely. It was four years old and I had forgotten all about it. Or so I thought.
I use my camera a lot for my art. I consider it my sketch book and my note book. I take lots of reference photos ... so many that I can't remember them all consciously. So I wonder if we really do store images deep in our minds ... until we use them or need them. In my case, did I keep that image in an internal photo file that I could only access through my subconscious? Did the image come forward when I needed to express this emotion?
Here is another thought. The image that bloomed in my brain that day is still very strong and, although I have found a reference photo that expresses it very well, there is still more to say. It feels like it has enough energy to inspire more than one drawing. I can think of many ways to express it. The expressions of it will be different, but the main image/emotion will stay the same ... or maybe that will evolve too. I will think of it as a seed image that is generating many different versions of itself.
If it is like a seed ... then I will let it keep growing in different ways and harvesting its fruit. Perhaps this "seed image" was from my deep subconscious and it was waiting for a time to express itself.
In any case, art is deep and wide and alive and I wish you the joy of it.
All is well when you draw. The world waits for you to catch its essence. Time pauses as you trace its contours. The universe awaits your touch in silent expectation as you consider your next drawing. Don't wait. Draw something right now. This simple act will soothe your anxious and awaiting audience.
When I draw any subject, I understand it better. I understand it in a visual way of course, but also in a kinetic and emotional way. I understand it in ways that cannot be said with words.
1. You will need something to draw with and something to draw on. Paper and pencil, chalk and sidewalk, finger and mud, brunt stick and cave wall; all these things will do.
I was walking along the other day and I was overcome with a strong emotion and an image to go with it. (I usually don't get my image ideas that way.) I don't know what made me "see" this image or what triggered the emotion. It may have been something as obscure as the angle of the sun. The image was quite clear in my mind, though, and still is.