Drawing Chops, aie, where are they...

Drawing is both a great pleasure and a humbling experience. Once you've drawn something -- I'm talking here about drawing from objects, rather than abstraction -- you know so much more about it than you did before. And every drawing reminds you how far you are from getting good at this stuff.

With daffodils blooming and the weather warm enough to sit outside to work, I did a couple of fairly shabby old attempts. But the attempt is the whole thing when you're working your skills back up. Without these attempts you'll never get back into the spirit of drawing, and letting yourself just do your best with no ambition to excel.

I notice that the last two drawings I had done in this book date to March 2010, which was probably the last time I was free to get lost in a drawing with no awareness of what was going on around me.

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Favorite subject of mine: orchids and peace lilies



The snowdrops were important that year, since I picked them and took them in to HP's hospital room so he could have them with him, to remind him that home was waiting for him.

This was shortly before HP came home from the rehab, and I wasn't free to become to engaged in this form of absorbing art again till quite recently. Drawing takes you to quite a different place from other artforms, which you can in fact pursue, though it's difficult, in short bursts of concentration, and I did that, quite prolifically.

But getting into that other area of the mind that drawing asks for, that's not very possible unless you are free of the expectation of interruption and crisis at every moment.



The empty bird feeder is a sign of spring: the birds can fend for themselves just fine once the weather warms up and insects and plant life provides them a living. I still keep the suet feeder, though, so as to see woodpeckers and nuthatches.



Daffodils again, my perennial favorite, growing out of pachysandra.

I noticed today that as I sat quietly on the patio with my cup of tea and my simple materials, just a blank book of good paper and a ballpoint pen, all I had to hand at the moment, that the birds came back to the suet feeder and trotted about the branches overhead, undisturbed by my presence. That was a very good sign! It could also mean that everyone's an art critic.