Draw Often, Relax and Enjoy!

When I teach art, I learn from my students. This is one of the biggest rewards for being a teacher. I am teaching a beginners drawing class at the local college, and I have a very good class, very enthusiastic, an interested bunch of adult learners. We have been together for four weeks now, and I am happy with their progress. They are all doing quite well.

I am beginning to realize from seeing them draw in class, that one of the hardest lessons for them to learn is to draw often, relax and have fun. I put that on the blackboard, I tell them several times in class, and yet when I give them an in-class drawing assignment to do what do I see? They hunch over their paper, they grip their pencil like they are going to write, they get deadly serious, and start drawing. When I approach them to look at their work, they start apologizing, or try to hide it. Their work is good, but I can see the tension in their lines, in their shading.

This has been a great lesson I have been given by my students. Up until a few years ago, this would have been me as well. I had been drawing for decades, but still had not learned how to relax and enjoy.

I am not sure where this approach to drawing comes from, but it seems to be ingrained into us all. I wonder if it was not built into us in our early formative years learning to write. As a child, we had to develop small muscle control for writing. We started with big pencils and big letters, and as we gained control, our letters and pencils got smaller. It was all about learning control, and we had to concentrate hard because we were getting graded, and it was important to Mom and Dad. We took it very serious, even for young children.

Somehow, this same grip on the pencil, and this same attitude of serious, hard effort seems to transfer to our early efforts at art. Maybe because by now this approach feels natural and familiar. Any way, this whole complex of feelings, and motor skills move immediately into our art.

I can remember as an early student of art, how I noticed the relaxed, sure and big motions with which the art teachers drew. I wanted to draw like them, so I redoubled my serious attitude, hunched more over my paper, and gripped my pencil tighter. Isn't this the way I learned to write better? The problem was that doing that did not achieve what I wanted to in my drawing.

The second contributor toward this get serious and draw attitude was that I did not draw enough. Whenever I would sit down to draw, I was bound and determined that the drawings I did were going to be the best drawings I had done yet in my life, and definitely something to frame and put up in the local art gallery. After all, if I only drew for five hours a month, I had to make the most of the time didn't I? No time to waste playing, doing drawings to learn from, or worse, drawings that would not make Mom's refrigerator door.

Thank God, I have reached a stage in my drawing where most of what I do is play or for learning. I realize now that eight or nine out of ten drawings are not going to be my best, and that the vast majority are needed to learn the skills to produce the really good ones I do. Do I still do "serious" drawings? Yes, I do, but some of my very best are play ones that spontaneously appeared on the paper, and these often have more feeling and energy than my "serious" ones. These spontaneous ones are a real joy and surprise. They are the true gift of lots and lots of practice drawings. The "serious" ones are more carefully planned, carefully executed, and appeal to my organized brain and are very satisfying in their own way. I need both to feel fulfilled as an artist.

Now, I draw at least once, and some days, several times a day. I draw to work out problems, to learn, to play, to experiment, to create, and sometimes just to draw. With all this drawing, I have time to copy masters and learn what they have to teach through their drawings, I have time to make mistakes and learn how to do better, I have time to draw a thumbnail, a value study, experiment with composition, and then take a shot at the final finished drawing.

There is no substitute for drawing, relaxing and enjoying the process.

This is the hardest lesson for me to teach my students -- draw as much as you can, relax and enjoy. The more you draw, the faster you become better. Draw enough, and it becomes part of your life.

What Is My Objective?

I have missed blogging in the last two weeks. I was very sick with a flu, and had lots of work related things come together and a visit from my children. Insanity, and with it reflection.

Being sick gave me time to think, and think I did. This is the first time all year that I did not draw every day. I was very disappointed, because I even managed to draw during the last flu in the spring, but I just fell asleep and woke up the next day, so that was that. It was these events that upset me, and got me to thinking about what is my objective in art, and how am I doing.

Thank heavens for the visit from my children right after the flu. I restarted my drawing, I relaxed as I toured them around, and when I showed them my art, I got reconnected to it. Now that I am restarting, I get a chance to re-evaluate what I was doing, what worked and what didn't, what's most important and what is not, and most importantly, that I have to scale back because I didn't have any flex time to handle overloads, sickness and emergencies. So, I need to re-evaluate my art goals and give up my believe that I can do everything.

Before I got sick, I was growing rapidly in my art, and was very confused, and reaching out all over trying to find what direction to head in. Now that I am re-starting, I need to re-focus on where I want to grow with my art. My art goals are never clear to me. What I want I can't define. I feel it more than I can conceptualize it.

For instance, I love realism, but I want an artistic twist to it. I can look at abstract art now, and feel it, but can I get that feeling in a realistic piece? How real is real? How loose can I get? I guess I want to be loose, and real, and look artsy all at once.

I want to improve my techniques. I want to be able to draw anything from my mind's eye, and have it look very real. I want to draw people from any angle or position, move the light around, and get it right. Add a background of trees, or a room, or furniture, and get it all right.

I want to paint more, and study composition. Use what I learn in drawing to create my paintings. Get looser, look more real, and more like art than photography.

I want to understand why I seem to draw a lot and paint a whole lot less. I want to paint more. I want to feel the subject in my being, then transfer this to my art. What does "feel" mean? To me "feel" means feel the physical being, then feel my emotions towards that being, and instill both in my work. If it is a living being, I want to feel its feelings too, and bring that into the mix.

My prime goal is to improve my art and keep improving it. That is my prime directive and has not changed. But art is more that creating art. To me it is also trying to earn a living at it, showing it and giving something back to the community with it. These are my secondary goals. I still believe that without the prime objective, these other objectives become meaningless.

When I think about these, I feel I am on the right track, but I have trouble figuring out what I need to do to work on these objectives. This is where the confusion sets in, the impossible balancing act begins, and if I am not careful, where I lose my way.

I know I need to eat and pay my bills, but to stop all art to do it, makes my life meaningless. So to become a better artist, to keep first things first, I need to re-evaluate how I manage my life, what I need to do to exist, and truly make my art and my lifestyle one in the same, or I will get lost again.

I don't think this confusion, and struggle to work on my art objectives will ever disappear. I think this struggle is as much a part of life, as it is a part of art. I wonder if the great artists who have died, died in the struggle. I think so. Only after our death, does the success of our struggle become clear, for while we are alive, we constantly strive to improve, balance and manage. Life is art, art is life. The struggle gives meaning to life.