My friend Emily, who is a gifted and esteemed classical musician, joined us at the Saturday morning drawing class this past weekend. She loves art but had never drawn before. Both this week and the one before we’ve been working from simple forms—oranges, limes, mangoes, eggplants, an orange pepper, a lemon. So it was a good class for Emily to come to because drawing simple things is easy in some ways.

But making the drawing compelling is not so simple. We explored negative space this time, the space around the object. In Japanese art there’s a conscious emphasis on making the negative space dynamic and finding balance between negative and positive. When we find that balance the work starts to take on resonance and we want to keep looking at it. Without it, we feel the image is overly familiar or dull and turn away. At least, I do!
Emily did wondrous work, full of imagination. Being an artist in one realm carries into other realms, not to mention life. The whole class sprinted forward, liberated by the simplicity of what we were putting our attention to and by the challenge too. Of course, next week we will shake all of that up when we step outside to draw. It will be interesting to see if we can find the simplicity in the great wide open space around us.

Next week is our last class and I will take the summer off from teaching this wonderful group of artists. I am in the midst of another writing project that I want to finish in July. And I’m also doing some new graphic art work in story form. I see possibiliities for that work to manifest on a higher level than some of the hard labor graphic work I did in the past to pay the bills. I’m truly excited about the way my work is unfolding even in the midst of small discouragements. Like the Buddha said—everything is perfect. My job is to keep responding to what calls me and trusting it is for a good reason. I do trust that.

This blog will likely go down to once a week or less, after next week’s class. There will be, with luck, a report of sitting ocean side on a sunny summer day doing nothing at all but feeling grateful for being here. Cheers!

A note this morning from Debra who asks after Hafid, a young deaf man in Morocco I wrote about in a previous post. My friend, Veronika, is working for a service organization in a small town in Morocco. Around this time last year she sent up a flare asking for money for Hafid to get an MRI. He has some faint hearing but no ear holes and as he grew up the bone closed over the entry to the ear canal. And around this time last year I won a couple of hundred dollars on a lucky bet at a Kentucky Derby party so Hafid got his MRI. Ridiculous to think of how little money separated this young man from medical services.

Once the MRI was back, the doctors in Morocco declared there was nothing to be done. Had he been operated on as a baby it would have been simple to fix. This was sad news and I suggested to Veronika that we must not give up. She sent out a query to her list asking if anyone knew a doctor in the States who might look at Hafid’s MRI and give a second opinion.

The good news came in just yesterday. A doctor here says there are three ways forward for Hafid, all of which will restore hearing to a functional degree. Inside the deformed ears the inner canal is perfect. The first and best way he suggests is plastic surgery to improve the appearance of the ears with a special hearing aid designed for such conditions.

So, perseverence has yielded wonders. Here’s to the hard-working devotion of Veronika. There is a way forward. Now the next step involves finding a doctor who will perform these services for free and finding the funds for Hafid to come over here to have the work done. I’m done betting on horses but am hoping my new work will yield a surplus of cash so that I might donate to the cause.

Thanks for writing, Debra! So curious your note came the day after Veronika sent the news! It really is the concerns of others that are changing this young man’s life! I’ll keep you posted on the developing story. The hope is he might come to New York next December.

It was hot and sunny on Saturday and I decided that with summer in the air, at last, that we ought to draw tropical fruits—oranges and lemons and limes. The great thing about drawing such simple shapes is that anyone can do it with a fair amount of accuracy and we can then focus on the bigger issues of drawing—line and color and composition. Do we do line first or shape? How do we introduce color—as a block or just in hints? There’s no right or wrong. What’s important is that we become conscious of what we’re doing and stick to that consciousness throughout. When we start stabbing away in a mindless way things can get pretty muddy.
Three hours of drawing the same things can get boring unless we’re really finding that consciousness. David Hockney says there are infinite ways to approach the way we represent things with line and color. Once we hook into that infinite possibility and find an angle to explore, we can draw all day. Everyone in class got to the place of deep fascination and experimentation—very exciting.
Art is great practice for focus. It’s a yogic practice—one-pointed attention. It clears all the other dross from our minds and helps us get to that pure space where inspiration creeps in the back door. I think that’s as beautiful as any picture we make.

We did monoprints again in our Saturday morning art class. It’s a drawing class but I want us to draw in a lot of different ways so we get to know what way speaks to us. We’ve done a lot in charcoal so making monoprints is an opportunity to create an image that is more graphic and abstract.

This time we carved images into rubber. It cuts like butter so you can get a nice smooth line if you want to. We ended up with a bunch of rubber stamps and went from there, partly because I forgot to bring the retarder and when we rolled out ink on plexiglass plates it dred too quickly to draw into it. Still, some fabulous work was done by our intrepid group who are not daunted by less than perfect circumstances, as true artists are not.

Some of us struggle with our imagery and what we want to do. I am struggling myself at the moment. My own true preference is to draw more in the style of cartoons, to create an alternate universe of dancing crocodiles and things like that. But it’s fun to explore and discover other aspects of ourselves. Developing a visual language takes time and even though discourageent sometimes raises its naughty head we just have to carry on. We have to keep doing things over and over in art. And over and over we have to let go of expectation and flow with what emerges. There’s always something great in it.
I occasionally think I ought to be ‘teaching’ more, telling them how to do things. But I resist doing that as much as possible. We’ve all jumped into the deep end of the pool. Sometimes but we flail around a bit, but that’s okay. It’s a faster way to learn and far less inhibiting than having someone stand over you and tell you you’ve got it all wrong—although some people do prefer that way. In our class, we look for what we like in things and try to build on that. And I’ve seen every artist grow, which is a credit to their brave experimentation.

More important than the art is the deep pleasure of sitting with a group of super people all immersed, deeply immersed, in the process of making something fabulous. Sharing a few laughs, dropping a word or two here and there but mostly just working, working. We have the music on and outside the sun shines. Afterwards we lay our work out and look to see the wonders within it.

And next Saturday I will actually bring the retarder and a new kind of paper.