Drawing Every Day

    I find time to paint practically every day because I have a small studio in my home. I know most people don’t that that advantage, but there are a lot of ways to work around limitations. The easiest, I find, is to DRAW EVERY DAY.

    A sketchbook and drawing pencil are nice, but they aren’t really necessary. Any paper will do. Lined notebook paper is not optimal, but it works. The clean back of junk mail works too. And while professional drawing pencils are wonderful, a regular pencil or a cheap ball point pen can be satisfactory. In fact, limited resources may hone your skills. The point is to draw every single day. People may think you’re just doodling. That’s tough because you have to define yourself instead of letting them define you. Just draw!

    Drawing can be a formal experience, too. Before COVID isolation, my wife and I took a series of weekly evening classes at the Art Institute of Chicago. We were given boards, a folding stool, and mediums (I know, the correct plural is media; but this is art). Each week the instructor led us to a different gallery to copy a painting or sculpture in pencil or pastels. By doing this I learned how artists approached their work. After about 90 minutes, we’d return to the classroom for critique, which was always positive. This was a wonderful discipline that required me to draw something I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to draw otherwise. But it got me drawing. And improved my skills.

    Around that time I broke my right wrist. I’m right handed. But I went to the classes anyway, and I drew with my left hand. I was awkward at first, but I quickly became dexterous. And I continued to draw.

     Another thing I find helpful is to find an artist you like and study that person’s work weekly. The library is a resource for finding books containing work by any artist. And the internet, of course, is also great. If you study one or two paintings by artists each week, you can learn a lot. It helps to ask yourself questions about the works: How do they use color? How do they use balance? What is the focal point? Where is contrast - and is it contrast by size, hue, or light and dark? How does they accomplish something you find a weakness in your work? Having asked yourself these questions, draw the entire piece or a portion of it. 

    The point is to draw every day. You’ll improve. I can’t guarantee that the images in your head will match what you put on the paper. Mine don’t. But they are closer than they used to be.

Draw!

Left-handed drawing after I broke my wrist. Conte crayon and charcoal on paper.

     The Process

I’m not Van Gogh who dragged his easel out

Into the fields of France, whose magic sight

Enabled him with swift, sure strokes to paint

An earless portrait or a starry night.

No. I prep a canvas with leftover paint

And hope beyond hope that pictures emerge.

No clean clear canvas surfaces for me:

A dirty plane will make my painting surge.

It doesn’t work? I gesso over, or

Slash the canvas and rip it from the frame

Without a fear. Defeat creates new work.

I move from failure - and refuse all blame.

I am not Hemingway who set a sheet

Of paper on his desk, picked up a pen

And wrote of bullfights, civil wars - in fact, 

Whole books before he set it down again.

I jot ideas, draw, scratch through, revise.

Revise again. My paper’s not pristine.

I take a breath, consider, write some more.

Or print out what I have, start a new screen.

I own no failure - only lessons new.

Each time applying what I learned to do.

I considered the painting on the right a failure (acrylic on 16 x 20 inches stretched canvas). I ripped the canvas off and restretched new canvas. The painting on the left of Owen, age 11, is much better, I believe. Ignore the shadow at the top of the portrait. Grace and mercy, remember?

Perfection

 

Perfection

    As a child, my parents drummed into me: “If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well!”  This implies perfection, and is a platitude that most of us can relate to. For years, I believed it. They were my parents. I know I’m not alone. Believing this has caused paralysis in a lot of people. It makes a lot of people afraid to try new things because they might not be perfect. What we fail  (there’s that word) to realize, however, is that if we were afraid to be imperfect, we would never have learned to walk, to speak, to think, or even to do somersaults.

    When I was teaching high school English composition, I had students who couldn’t put even a single word on a page because it might not be the right word. They were paralyzed mentally. Sometimes this was the result of overwhelmingly high expectations by parents. I was never sure why they were afraid to fail, but whatever the reason, they were paralyzed. 

    I see this among new painters, too, in the classes I take at the local community college. Making the wrong brush stroke is so terrifying, they don’t paint anything and instead of failing by trying, they fail through inaction.

    I paint most days. And I have at least a couple paintings going at a time. If I get to a point that the paint has to dry before I can continue, I have another painting to work on. 

    When I start, I don’t worry about that first stroke. Frequently I have sketched. More usually I have an image in my mind. (I hasten to add that the image on the canvas never matches the image in my head.) Sometimes, at the end of the day, I have paint I don’t want to waste so I smear it on a fresh canvas. And occasionally that sparks a painting. 

    Before I paint, I slap on a thin coat of ochre or raw sienna. I don’t start with a pristine canvas. It’s already imperfect, and I can’t make a mistake with it. I just paint. If it doesn’t work or I am not happy with the result, I have choices:

• I can paint over the mistakes. I do that with every single canvas, I have to admit. 
• If the painting is beyond help, even after re-painting, I can cover it with gesso, which is a base coat on raw canvas - or in this case a new base coat on the crappy painting I don’t like. I do this a lot. 
• My third option, one I use less frequently, is to rip the canvas off the stretchers and put new canvas on. Suddenly I have a brand new canvas to either succeed or fail with. 

    After I wrote this first blog, I read it over. I deleted a couple whole paragraphs. I moved some things around. I added and changed some words. My first draft was not perfect. Too bad. This one probably isn’t either. 

    But perfection is overrated. And in painting, as in writing, nothing has to be permanent. Give yourself some grace and mercy. I do.