The Best Source

       Do you remember being given art assignments in grammar school, high school, or even college? They were generally focused on ways to use different media, and somehow we were expected to be instinctively creative enough to come up with an idea to illustrate the teacher’s vague instructions. “Show transparency” “Design a container for air” “Make a self-portrait but don’t draw your face” (as if we could draw our own faces at that point!) Those assignments instantly caused the problem of WHAT to draw or paint or sculpt. Endless thumbing through magazines provided by the teacher only occasionally solved the problem of WHAT (never mind the copyright issues!)                                                                             Now, I hear similar woes from my drawing students. “Oh no, I’m almost finished and I don’t know what to draw next!” I remember that awful feeling of lostness and a blank mind.  I watch them struggle through the binder of (copyrighted, but explained) photos and my own envelope of photos to find an image to draw. Part of the struggle comes from something I tell everyone who draws with me: Pick something you LOVE because you will be staring at it for a long long time. How do you pick something you love from a pile of other people’s pictures?? Other people’s pictures represent other people’s experiences.  (Reminds me of one of the many things I learned from That Shirley Who Can Do Anything. When she owned a store, she would never buy a product to sell unless she had “held it, smelled it and felt it”. Pretty hard to love a view or an item if we haven’t “held it, smelled it and felt it”!)                                                                                                                                                                            The point is that the older we get, the more we experience, and it is precisely this experience that gives us the ideas!  Now that I am pushing 50 with an ever-shorter stick, the ideas are overwhelming me! Everything I see, every place I go, ideas are flooding into my brain! Nothing in my life is exempt from consideration for a drawing or painting! (The only necessary filter is the consideration whether or not anyone else will like it, because if my art doesn’t sell, I will have to get a job.)

A Good Yarn – colored pencil – SOLD