A wooden box

wooden box
Originally uploaded by daveterry.

Another copy of another artist's sketch. I feel guilty somehow. Yet I feel it's a must if I'm to improve my hand.

I've drawn lots of wooden things before but never a box. This was great fun.

I know I'm enjoying the process when I lose track of time. Drawing is a form of time travel. I enter the worm hole and when I exit I know not how much time has elapsed.

It's as if I enter a state of unconsciousness, like falling asleep. I feel myself entering the zone when the things around me drop into the background. Voices become distant and indistinct. I see nothing but the page. I feel nothing but the pen gliding across the page. I watch as the pen's black lines create the image. I know not how or where the pen goes. I just see the trail it leaves behind.

Sometimes I like the line left behind, but other times I would have preferred that the pen took a different direction. But the black line has been laid down. It's already occurred. I'm merely a spectator of my own hand. My left brain can't influence the right brain's direction.

The critical left brain does observe the image when complete and often complains of the lopsided box it now sees before it. And the right brain promises to do better the next time. But actually he doesn't care. The point of the sketch is not to draw a perfect replica of a thing. Cameras do that. The point is not the destination but the journey. Losing track of time for a moment, some moments, or an hour is the point of the exercise. Nothing more really. But this is something the left brain can't understand.

In time the right will catch up to the left. It'll control the hand to please the left but there is no hurry. The right knows that if he finishes perfectly every time there will be no point to the sketching. There has to be always something kattiwampus.

And so the sketching exercises continue.

...dave
"It is only by drawing often, drawing everything, drawing incessantly, that one fine day you discover to your surprise that you have rendered something in its true character." ~ Camille Pissarro.