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.

November 21st, 2006 | Category: Drawing Life | Subscribe to comments | Leave a comment | Trackback URL