I love the look of some of the sketchbooks I've stumbled across. Artistic doodles or doodle art. Making art often freezes me. The older I get the more easily I get stuck because I want perfection and making a mark risks imperfection. Looking at the looseness and spontaneity of the work is contagious. It doesn't matter if it's not perfect. Life is imperfect; messy, nonlinear, confusing, misinterpreted, too loud, too quiet. Looked at another way, however, and life's very refusal to be contained is perfection. Is creation.
Journals, canvases, sketchbooks all have borders. The idea, the creation is necessarily constrained within the confines of the border, the edge. That is an unavoidable stricture. Adding more by being too rigid in that impossible chase after pefection just compounds the problem.
Easy to state the problem, less easy to stop it. Came across a blog, which I'll try and find again, which listed every day things to draw every day . What a way to improve one's skill and at the same time instill looseness.
Am working on a drawing. It started out as a sketch, hardened into a drawing, lay dormant for weeks because of having no idea which way to go, and now has metamorphosed into a pencil sketch overlaid with coloured pencil. Which surprisingly I quite like the look of. It's a teenage boy's sketch; surreal monsters, hands with finger trees, doors into other dimensions - all the result of just trying not to be too anal about things but to draw for the sake of drawing.
Which is a compelling argument for drawing every day things every day in a sketchbook.
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