sometimes you just have to draw a cat

Did you ever need to draw a cat and realize that you don’t have a cat?  Well, I did.

I used to have a cat.  But I don’t have a cat anymore.  I’m catless.  Still the desire to draw a cat comes over me from time to time.  So feeling the feline mood recently, I (poised with my blue ball point pen in hand) surfed the internet in search of somebody else’s cat to draw.  Happily, lots of cat enthusiasts post pictures of their beloved pets. (I would too if I had a cat.)

Happily too all cats do almost exactly the same things so the odds of my ever getting “caught” using “this” picture or “that” one is totally eliminated.  Well, that and the fact that this is a most summary and capricious cat drawing.

It’s just a quick sketch.  Just had to get it out of my system.

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unimpeded thought

The morning coffee drawing was supposed to be about “unimpeded thought.”  I had been learning about free-association as a means of invention in writing.  Ray Bradbury had said that “we’ve become so conditioned to worry about grammar, word choice, and punctuation that we deny ourselves the luxury of unimpeded thought.”  So I was asking myself what would be comparable in drawing?  The trip to Unimpeded Thought sounds like just the destination I’ve been looking for:  forget these adverts for world cruises to all the tropical paradises.  Just put me on the slow boat to Unimpeded Thought.  Hey, I like luxury as much as the next person.

Only problem is that I’m not sure how to get there.

Have to contemplate it some more ….

In the interim I sought to remove all mental barriers between me and my still life objects, they who pose so nicely for me day and night.

Power and speed be hands and feet

An artist is not just her face.  The hands deserve some self-portraiture.  I draw with my hands, both of them, even with the non-dominant one, and it might be that they represent my truer nature even more than my face. They deserve more contemplation than I usually give them.

And my feet are also very much “me.”  They take me everywhere I want to go.  They take me to all those places where afterwards my hands draw.

So next time you think about doing the self-portrait, Artists, remember the hands and feet.

“Power and speed be hands and feet.”  originally from Beaumont and Fletcher as quoted in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “Self-reliance.”