Drawing of Older boy
Drawing is funny. I used to be obsessed with writing, and I would be dying all day to have the kids go to bed so I could write, and that was fun but it was never finished. And it is satisfying to read over something you’ve written, but you can only read it a couple times before all the snap wears off and you lose your perspective on it. Then in the end it’s phrases and sentences that you like that stay with you, and that’s nice too. But drawing satisfies with a louder smack because it only takes a little while to finish a drawing, not weeks and years, so that even if I have five projects (painting and washes and whatnot) going on at the same time, there will be something getting done, and if I do a sketch it’s done just like that. And then you can put it on the wall and get into it again any time you want, as many times as you like, and it is a continuing source of pleasure to look at what you somehow created out of your brain and eyes and hand, and whatever else you put in it.
This morning I drew six self-portraits, which got worse and worse, and I was in a tizzy. All the self-portraits were less of a likeness than the very first one I drew before I had any ideas about triangles connecting the outside of the eyes and nose, or the eye-chin ratio, and all that, and I spent a great deal of time this morning drawing vertical and horizontal axes for the face and then measuring with my pencil against the mirror as well as making sure there was symmetry and that the eyes were one eye-distance apart etc. Despite all that none of them looked anything like me. It was quite frustrating and I had to finally stop myself from drawing until I dropped dead, because I just did not understand why something so simple was coming out so wrong, and I was starting to dislike drawing and having to be thinking of all the rules I read about drawing faces. Thinking is not what I like about drawing at all, so I stopped and remembered what I like, which is the simple contour or the simple shaded shape–like the melody line in Jimmy Brown the Newsboy as Earl Scruggs plays it, sweet and beautiful even in that tune that a child probably wrote.
So then this afternoon I managed to tear myself away from the mirror and went to sit with my son as he was playing Wall-E on the Wii, and drew the following sketch in five minutes, just like the first time I ever drew, which was that hat and spoon. It was the same kind of quiet, exciting fun to see it suddenly done. It’s mysterious how that happens. I do like it.
So it’s funny. I like drawing. I don’t really like studying drawing though.