Late night is a good time to draw too. When you are tired, drawing takes on a different character. The lines appear, the hands move, and the mind’s movements are there, but in a sleepy, less fastidious way. I am more hurried and more careless late at night. I almost draw as though just to get the drawing done so I can sleep, but the consequence is that I let myself freely react. I stop thinking so much. It’s a good discipline, using Night to turn off the censors.
This is my nearly instantaneous drawing of the garden. I’ll call it the after dinner drawing. Sit down, look out the back door, draw, get up.
For today’s morning coffee drawing I looked out the window and drew the dense confusing foliage of a beautiful, but enigmatic tree. When presented with something like the dense confusion of masses of leaves, you do well to simply let yourself go. I let the pen trace the edges of what I thought I saw. I wasn’t concerned about its ever looking like a tree. Honestly it doesn’t really “look like a tree” even in real life. It’s simply a wall of green.
Of course I know it’s a little wood out there so it doesn’t need to “look” like mine or anyone else’s idea of a tree among trees. However in drawing one sometimes wants the stuff to “look like” what it is. Were I too insistent upon that goal in this instance, I suppose I would just never draw this wood because it IS a confusing mass of leaves. Period. That is the reality. There is no beautifully differentiated sense of lovely trees hanging out with other trees. If you were a bird zooming down looking for a branch to light upon, you’d better have terrific navigating skills. Cause it’s a jungle out there.
So sometimes in drawing you let yourself enter the jungle of lines. You just wander around scratching at this and that. Watch the light pour over things and pretend you’re taking a photon’s journey. This didn’t need to be anything more than a meditation upon tangled green confusion.
And that’s what it is. Oh, and the coffee was great.
I spent so much time on one drawing (of which this is a detail) that I can be forgiven if I love looking at it. I cross hatched until I thought my hand would fall off. And still I didn’t stop.
It’s a good thing I just stocked up on ball point pens — or else I’d be running out of ink.
I was copying Cezanne’s “Still life with Apples and Peaches” from the National Gallery of Art, and though I’ve drawn it many times in front of the actual painting I made this copy from a reproduction in a book.
The detail of the painting above corresponds roughly to the section of my drawing featured in this post.
It will sound strange. But that thrill is why one draws. I was looking at the crystal creamer and finding myself thoroughly confused. What with its complicated transparencies and my bi-focal befuddlements, I couldn’t tell what was where. My drawing makes it seem simple when the real object and the real sensation is utterly mind boggling. The crystal creamer is a labyrinth of lozenges and fond patterns.
Perhaps in other drawings I can get at the confusions and portray them. For now I want to hold fast to the thrill of making this drawing — this drawing that I made just five minutes ago –because the ball point pen’s delicacy makes these lines, as you draw them, feel like glass. How the medium and the object seem well suited!
I cannot say enough good things about this pen, this common dime store pen.
Thou still unequaled tool of penmanship,
Thou practical pen of school room and cursive theme-writing,
Cerulean line-maker, who canst thus express,
A surreptitious note more secretly than thy marks?
What word-processed typography compares with this spare technology
For Scribbles or Grocery lists, or of both,
In Walmart or the wild hallways of Middle School?
What blue paradise is this? What sheeny marks?
What ease of use? What bargain when on sale in pack of ten?
What smeary linearity? What wild ecstacy?
I really like my ball point pen A LOT! My apologies to John Keats for the pilfering of his great verse!
Sometimes the key is to count. To make many, to make merry, count! In music you count the beats or the measures. You can count the number of drawings you make and become prolific.
As you replay an idea, you can change it a little. Variations on a theme works with a line as well as with a melody. Yesterday was my day to take a break from other things, and I found myself too fatigued as well as too lazy and distracted to make much sense of the daylight. So I picked the charming ceramic Spanish guitarist off the shelf and played a few riffs off her shape.
I decided to be as lazy in my drawing as I was in my head and let the pen lines venture where they willed.
Some of the drawings got a little crazy.
I turned her this way and that, then she began to sing as well as play.
Sometimes your art should be play! Why be so serious? Sometimes a glass of wine — or perhaps just as intoxicating a cup of tea! — and let the pen lines play havoc with life!
I always have a few games to make my fingers dance — to escape the leaden moods — to wind my way back from the forest of duties into some quiet, airy place composed entirely of lines — folding and coiling lines!
Count! Dance, sing, tap the beats — measure, measure, clap and step until the music stops!
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