Drawing Club

Posted on | February 11, 2010 |

Just spent a week here in Boston with Thierry Bogliolo, of Findhorn Press, the publisher of my book, The Confident Creative.  Thierry lives in the south of France and I think we might have had warmer weather if we’d met there! (Wouldn’t that be nice?!) As it turned out, there were massive snowstorms in the midwest so he didn’t make it out to Minneapolis as planned and we got to spend more time together.  He came up with a great idea for The Confident Creative website—to offer a free pdf download to help people who are working with the book form their own drawing clubs.  It’ll be fun to do!

This past week, I’ve done a couple of phone interviews about the book with journalists in London.  They’re asking me in various ways what drawing can do for people.  It’s really quite simple.  First, drawing is fun.  It makes you feel like a kid again, especially if you can let yourself scribble and not feel you need to be “good.”  In fact, it can teach us that it’s great to just be!  These are stressful times and a lot of us can get locked into a sense of hyper-responsibility as adults.  We all need to loosen up sometimes and it’s great to think we only need a pencil and paper to take us out of our over-thinky minds and into a space of imagination and presence.

Secondly, by drawing in all sorts of ways—upside-down, with our eyes closed, with our left hand and so on—we start to believe we can experiment with all sorts of things in our lives.  There’s no one right way to do anything and often breakthroughs come when we step out of our habitual ways of thinking and into some experimental action.

Of course, if we do draw from life, we get the added benefit of taking the time to observe the world around us with a little more care.  We get to appreciate it a little more and that’s a good thing too.  I could go on and on.  One of the reasons I wrote the book is that I became aware, over time, of just what a friend drawing has been for me in my life.  Every time I sit down to draw I come into a place of peace and happiness—it’s like a meditation.  It gives me a little “time-out” and also helps me get perspective on my life.

But I also have to say that teaching my drawing class on Saturday mornings has really shown me the huge benefits of working alongside other artists.  We get to encourage each other, of course, and also to learn from each other.  Sometimes other people can see the real quality of our work more easily than we can see it ourselves.  We all have a tendency to look at our own work with a critical eye so there can be huge benefits to working alongside others.  We can get a lot of great ideas from each other too.  It’s fun.  When I come up with the outline for forming a drawing club, I’ll post it here too.  And, if you start one, please let me know!

The drawing above is a monoprint drawing.  I inked a plexiglass plate then placed a piece of paper on it and drew on the back of the paper.  When you turn the paper over—presto!  I love how it has so much texture and visual interest.

I’ll be back here next week.  Meanwhile, hope the sun is shining in your part of the world!

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