Process Drawing

I avoid this meeting place, to not have to feel the trepidation, the sense that I can’t do it well enough. When I attempt something creative and it doesn’t turn out like I want, it’s not that gratifying and starts to create a resistance. Like when too much electricity goes through a too small wire, heat builds up where the electricity can’t pass through.

The next morning when I have some quiet time, I get out my sketch book. I love trees. I love their structures, the character of each species and the way they vary.

I love the shapes of leaves, and the veins that show the growth patterns. The veins are really important when you draw leaves, they inform the whole shape and help show the 3D-ness of them.

So, I’m journaling in my sketch book and I ask myself to draw just a small part of the redbud tree beside my porch. I am intrigued with just that one place where the low branch meets the trunk. I find that day, that working small and focusing on what intrigues me most feels good. (focusing more on the observing than the actual drawing.)

As I do this, I am falling in love with the morning sun on the trunk of the tree and the way the clouds cause the light to change, the sound of the wind in the new leaves. The sound that I had missed so much this winter.

My requirement is that I make the attempt, feel what comes up, spend time observing visually, and keep coming back to the playfulness of it.

Probably all this is in the Artist’s Way and I had just forgotten it, or is it in the Drawing on the Right Side of your Brain? Certainly much of it is coming from the study group with Sarah Oblinger. It feels like the kind of thing I just had to experience, will experience over and over, in order to get it from the inside. It seems to be the only way to call up the commitment to do it, to match the will with the desire.

As I’m journaling this in my sketch book, I keep asking myself to come back to the tree trunk. Just look at the place that is attracting my eye, soaking up the feeling and letting the pencil do as it will.