Monday 30 July 2012

Learning to Draw: Hardwood

I realized it was easier to draw what I imagined than what was at my feet. One book I read, The Natural Way To Be Miserable, claims the two are related.
I drew a large crumb I didn’t have to imagine. After that, individual sections of oak and I met like miners breaking through from opposite sides.
The book went on to say The artist forgets that he/she draws, when the page becomes easy as breath, breath easy as a word (doesn’t yet matter which one). It’s like standing before a fine shelf and wondering what you’ll put there.
I ditched any notions of near or far and pretended the floor was viewed from straight up, which meant—this I realized with Einsteinian impact – each path of oak called for its own exposition, which I now must provide. (Let’s see, at an inch and a half wide per strip, 60" wide in total, 6-7' long, this floor added up to about 250' of oak I had to draw.)
By this point I was ready to give the whole thing to Stan Still (no relation to Jennifer or Cheryl), a character I’ve met before, and let him learn to draw. He’d like the hardwood drawing. He'd finish it. He’d claim to see himself in the wood.

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