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!