direction

Two weeks ago I almost stopped drawing.

After trying to draw trees, landscapes, faces abstracts and using the teachings from two book it was more then clear that I don’t have any drawing talent what so ever.
It was also clear that I had to go through far more trouble then I planned when I started this blog. I just wanted a place were I could show the pictures in my mind in the same way as that other people show there holiday snapshots. They don’t have to take a course to learn to use there camera so why would I get so much trouble trying to do the same.

That was the point I reached two weeks ago when my involuntary holiday started.
Almost at ones I started noticing a few things. The talking in my head stopped without there being a clear reason why. I found that the more I thought in pictures the less the pain bothered me. (Which was a good thing because the pain medication didn’t work very good.) And I noticed that the moment I started thinking in pictures, I again felt the need to draw them.

At this moment I actually feel the need to spent far more time drawing then I’ve ever done.
It took me a while to figure out why.

A few weeks ago I came across an article about a book in which Malcolm Gladwell argues that there isn’t such a thing as talent.
From extensive testing scientists have found that there is a correlation between the number of hours that people have practiced a skill and there level of expertise. Or more specific that anyone can get to be an expert in any skill if he is willing to practice for 10,000 hours.

But that’s also the catch. 10,000 hours is a very large amount of time. To reach it you’d have to practice 7 hours a week for the next 10 years. Or 14 hours a week for the next 5 years.
For me it answers an other question that I’ve been asking myself for years: Why is it that experts always love what they do? Is that because they are very good in what they are doing?
No it isn’t. They are experts because they love what they do.

Start playing the piano when you’re ten. Practice two or three hours a week and by the time you’re 30 you will be very good. But nobody will think of you as talented because you’ve been doing it for 20 years.
But if you’re the kind of guy for whom drawing is the reason to get out of bed in the morning. The kind of guy who fails his tests because he was busy drawing and didn’t pay attention. It could very well be that by the time you drop out of school at your 15th or 16th you are considered a talented painter (or tattoo artist).

But why is it important for me to know this? Well I have two kinds of pictures in my mind.
A large part of the pictures in my mind are based on what I see of the part of the world in which I travel on a daily bases. Those pictures feel like snap shots and I need an easy way to show them.
Although it took a while I have found an easy way to show them by showing work by other artist. The world in which they live doesn’t differ that much from mine that I can’t use them to show my world. (Or actually if they do I don’t show them.)

Then there are the pictures of my own thoughts. Those pictures are far more complicated and I never expected to just show those pictures. It’s clear that showing my thought would be far more complicated.
The more complicated pictures take far more time to draw.
Until now I hardly ever drew them because I felt that they would come in the way of learning the easy tricks needed to show my snap shots. But now I know that isn’t true.
By taking more time to draw more complicated drawing I’m learning far more. Which means that I can draw ever more complicated thought.

{ Comments on this entry are closed }

Starting in a new direction.

Last year when I started this blog I gave myself the assignment to learn the skills needed to draw the pictures in my mind. Although I’ve been hard at work and indeed learned a lot of skills I have had the nagging feeling that I wasn’t succeeding. I wasn’t satisfied with my results.
The last few months I’ve been thinking about my last drawing and about some of the artsites I reviewed. I realized that the problem is that I’ve been concentrating on learning skills necessary to draw the right shapes.
Turns out that I’m not that interested in shapes. I’m much more interested in colors and in rhythm of colors. The way colors blend together to give you an impression of the world.

For my next drawing, I decided, I would concentrate on color instead of shape. And then I did nothing for something like a week. For some reason it seemed very frightening to do this drawing.
It took me a while to figure out why.
Until now I’ve always relied on my photographic memory. Even with the few abstract drawings I did I had a clear picture in my mind of what I was going to draw. Granted I didn’t always succeed in drawing what I wanted but I always knew what it was supposed to be. But not this time.
This time I only knew that I would probable use the colors blue and gray and I knew that I wanted to draw undefined shapes. I had no I idea what the drawing would look like when I was finished
I hoped that this drawing would give me some ideas about the next one.

Orange fish

It did give me some ideas about the next one.
While drawing I realized that I could get a very nice effect if I were to start in one of the corners.

{ Comments on this entry are closed }

direction

10,000 hours

Frightning drawing