The Art of Being (Together)

Posted on | May 17, 2009 |

On Saturday my drawing class met again.  It was a beautiful warm day and I thought for a moment we might draw outside but the grass was still wet from rain.  Behind the art center where we meet is a large, enchanting park and I slipped out very early in the morning with my scissors and a canvas bag to collect bits of nature for us to draw—two white tulips just beginning to wilt, pine cone buds from a long-needled fir tree and fully-minted pine cones too, lilacs and a few sprigs of a white flowering bush as well.  I inadvertently brought a small spider back to our drawing room too.

Some of us have been meeting now for three years and the new people fit right like old friends as if they’ve been there all along.  Our class is  relaxed one.  I try to make it challenging but I don’t push that.  Life is challenging enough.  We’re drawing for the sake of it, for the deep pleasure it gives and I think we’ll learn whatever we’re motivated and need to learn.  And, I have to say, the pleasure of drawing is enhanced in other ways when we do it together.  So, on this Saturday, we spent quite a bit of time studying our new spider friend who was leaping about between pine needles and lilac flowers.  Who knew that spiders can leap?  We watched as she began to spin a web.  It was as if, even in this new environment, she had to immediately set up home and get to work.  But, I’m happy to say, perhaps it was the mood of happy camaraderie in the room, she soon gave up the web and went back to leaping around.

This week, with only one class to go, we worked in markers and crayons.  I’ve noticed that sometimes we draw very faintly with pencil.  There can be a tendency to want to get it right and to be careful.  So this week, I decided, we did not need to be careful.  We needed to be leaping spiders and markers are children’s tools—we can only declare ourselves with boldness and there’s no chance to erase.

When we dove in, we began to chat in a casual low-key way.  A remark here, a laugh, a comment on the work, questions about the rules I set which we always break anyway, thank God, and then—stories.  Maybe because we were using markers, the stories we told were stories of our own childhoods.  Our backgrounds are different.  We’re from different cities—New York, Detroit, Miami, Toronto.  We were raised in different religious traditions—Jewish, Catholic and the United Church of Canada, which is, I confess, not much of a tradition and seemed to be mostly a place where our rather jolly, hung-over parents got a chance to doze off during very long, dull but well-intended sermons.  But, in a really deep way, all of our stories are the same.  We talked about the moments we were caught off guard by callous or insensitive remarks by teachers in school.  Discouraging as they are, wounding occasionally, I think they’re given to us so we can do the work of bouncing back.  I’m thinking of physics and spiders and laughing together, which dissolves just about everything.

Usually I think talking is not a good practice when we’re drawing.  We can’t concentrate well enough.  But this Saturday, I thought it was fine to just be.  We all got somewhere good with our drawing in time.  Talking was a perfect accompaniment and showed us more than any drawing lesson might have.

Our last class is in two weeks.  We’ll meet an hour later in the morning, draw outside in the park, and have a lunch picnic after.

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

I must say THANK YOU here also to the AMAZING women in my class who gave me a VERY generous gift certificate to an art store I love.  I truly feel so blessed to know each one of you and you are way too kind!

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

Finally, the drawing here is one I did this week when I was fooling around making drawings for the book.  I was drawing with my eyes closed as that always produces surprising results for me that are full of fresh ideas.  But for this one I’d been looking at a book of Japanese Ukiyo landscape prints and began my blind drawing with them in my mind.  I love the elliptical quality of the image, as if the whole cannot quite be grasped but only hinted at—the truth, I suspect!

Comments