Today I slept in and decided to work in the studio all day, which was mostly successful, and I wouldn't have known what was going on in the world if I hadn't looked at my phone. "If you have managed to pull that off," my best friend said, "continue on that course." So I went for a walk, and came home, and took a hot bath and ordered dinner, and I continued on my course. I made a collage in my sketchbook, which took up the better part of the day. Every now and then, I have to remind myself to get up and take a break when things don't make sense. To stop, and step back, and look again. I did a drawing yesterday that had an error in proportion, and I didn't notice until the drawing was finished. Part of this is lack of proper planning while sketching. "I'm not the most patient soul," my grandmother said to me once, and I also am not the most patient soul. Part of my work has been trying to work with this rather than against it - no rulers, no pencils, mistakes corrected creatively, the entire piece mostly done in a sitting or two. When I'm not working like that, however, the lack of patience shows in the draftsmanship, and it's embarrassing. It's very hard at times for me to slow down. Not in terms of what I'm doing, which is mostly lying prone and reading on the couch, but just in terms of thinking and planning and moving myself out of the world of the internet, or at least out of the world of social media where everything is either dire or a joke or a dire joke that shortens my attention span and zaps my will to live. On that note, I really enjoyed this Guardian interview with George Saunders, which also touches on stepping back, revising, and the results that follow. (There's an article linked in that interview which is also worth reading.) Currently reading: Lessons in Classical Drawing, by Juliette Aristides.
Slow down! Take breaks! Take the time to look before making a mark!
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AuthorArtist, essayist, divinity school dropout. Here for a good time, not for a long time. Archives
February 2024
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