The festive season has arrived and we’ve canceled this week’s art class because one of our troupe must go out of town. As one must from time to time. Each person brings their great spirit to class so we will wait for our esteemed fellow artist to return. Meanwhile we keep drawing and adding inspiration to our sketchbooks. Drawing is something in and of itself—a means, an end. It can also be preparation for what comes next, like life is. What we do today makes our tomorrow.

Inspiration can be anything—a thought, a word, the way the sun hits a rooftop at high noon, the work of other artists. We’re pulling images out of various publications and from the internet, images that make us glad we’re here. It can be anything.

Sometimes we can’t articulate why something speaks to us. Sometimes we have no idea how or if it might bring anything to our own work. Some things do, some don’t, but it’s all there for us. Just looking at stuff opens us up to a whole stream of possibilities. We just need to catch hold of one of them.

It’s like fishing—we cast our line and wait to see what shows up. We don’t actually choose the fish we catch, we’re just glad we got one. The fish chooses us if we’re present, patient and very, very still. The big ones are smart. We have to be extra still to get them and we have to offer them a real worm, not one of those phony ones. We have to offer them our best.

Can you see in this image why I love Cy Twombly? The funny thing is I just spontaneously started drawing like this. I wasn’t thinking about Cy at all but I confess I spent time with his great paintings of the four seasons at the Tate Modern last summer. They must have seeped into my blood! Love them. And, have to say, I love my new drawings. But, then, all is vanity. Or fun.

Yesterday we hung the member’s art show at the Arsenal Center for the Arts. It’s a large show with an impressive variety of impressive work. Hope all you Boston people will come to the opening on December 6th, 6-8. There’s some good inspiration in it.

This postcard arrived yesterday from Maureen, one of the women in the Saturday drawing class. It’s one of the quilts made by a group of women in Gee’s Bend, Alabama. These women had no art training and not much money but they were rich in spirit and resourcefulness and vision. They have created an extraordinary collection of quilts that exhibit immense creativity and sensational, original design. We talked about the quilts in class. The women of Gee’s Bend are an inspiration to the women of Boston.

The drawing class presently has four women in it plus myself. We are all over fifty, our children grown, and we’ve all got different histories in art and life. But we share a desire to create. We are thinking big. We are not thinking we have to be careful now. We know who we are and we’re ready to make marks, which is what drawing is. The marks we’re making are bold ones.

On the eve of Thanksgiving, I give thanks for the privilege of being able to share the experience of making marks with these four amazing women who have shown up to claim their hand in things. They are showing their hands with great heart and that’s what art is all about. Fun beyond fun.

From the outside it may look like a bunch of grown women have regressed to kindergarten level. In our art class we’ve spent four weeks learning to scribble. We’re still scribbling, or trying to. It’s harder than you think, harder for some than others. It’s hard to just let go, to not want to make it look like something, to just make lines and smudges. It’s hard to abandon the familiar, the old images we’re accustomed to making. And hard to abandon our uncertainty, can we do this? Can we be so simple?

After drawing for an hour we taped our work to the wall and took a good look. We stood back and took some time. We looked at our drawings in the sequence we made them and talked about how we let go of the impulse to make things, how we got more clear about composition, how we tried drawing just in smudges or just in dark black lines with tiny, hairy tendrils. When we took a moment and just looked we began to see what was there. We all identified something in our work that had value; something we might pursue further.

The stepping back is just as important as the surrender. What we discovered in those first drawings helped us when we turned to drawing from life. The way we draw says something too; it’s not just what we draw. That’s why we have to loosen up and play, so we see what the possibilities are. And that’s why we have to step back—so we can pull something from those experiments and use them with consciousness.

When a small group of people share their experiments, each uncovering interesting things in the other’s work, it opens us all up.  Besides, scribbling to U2 is just plain fun.

“We sit down before the picture in order to have something done to us, not that we may do things with it. The first demand any work of art makes upon us is surrender. Look. Listen. Receive. Get yourself out of the way.”

CS Lewis Experiments in Art Criticism

We sit down to make art in order to surrender. We do not sit down in order to impose ourselves on the page; we sit down in order to surrender. To look, to listen, to receive. To get ourselves out of the way.

It’s so much easier than all the effort we once applied to the task, so much more interesting, once we get the hang of it. We have to be fully in the moment, fully open. We have to let things happen, whatever they are. And enjoy.

It was our third week of class on Saturday and the work that is being done is astonishing. We don’t spend much time drawing what is in front of us. We spend time receiving. It feels like playing. And everyone receives something different. That’s the thrill.

The image above is a small piece of a bigger piece. When I cut it out I destroyed the bigger piece. What comes is infinite. We don’t need to hold onto anything.

We had our second class on Saturday. Although I’m supposed to be the teacher I draw along with the class and learn, I’m sure, as much as they do. We’re really focussing on playing. To begin we crank up the music and just draw in an abstract way, explore lines and marks and smudges. The music keeps us from going into our thinking, judging minds.

Later in the class we took some of our drawings and cut them up to make new images. After you play for a while you begin to discern elements of expression that are speaking to you. Taking a big drawing and cutting elements from it to paste on a small board really gets us thinking about simplifying. More to the point we begin to bring a more conscious intention to what we’re doing. The playing is all gesture and movement but we need conscious intention too.

We all brought in a couple of images or objects in which we found inspiration. Maureen brought in a postcard of a painting and some beads, Deb brought in a postcard of a painting that she loves of a bird painted by a Dutch artist in the sixteenth century, Sally brought in images she’d cut from magazines of patterns. One the cross-hatch pattern of a black wicker chair against a white wall. It was something I might not have appreciated if it were not for the way she cropped it so we didn’t see the whole chair. I’m really looking for how these things we’re attracted to can become the forms our own expression takes. I think they can open up powerful emotions and allow us to create images that take us somewhere.

Deb said she’d like to express compassion in her art. I know with that intention that the energy of compassion will come through in what she creates. That’s why playing in an abstract way is so great. It’s pure energy. And as we go on we can feel the energy more and more. And if a piece of art can convey compassion, how great is that?

Art can bring with it good energy.  It can be a reminder and an inspiration.  A good reason to make it.