Posts tagged as:

Emotions

Change in direction (drawing: Church window)

by Henk ter Heide on Monday July 16, 2007

The last few weeks I’ve been doing a lot of abstract drawings. Which is fun but it’s only a small part of the pictures I see in my mind. Most pictures are about people, animals and objects. I can only draw a small portion of these pictures because I don’t have the skills.

This morning I decided it was time to move on. I went down town to get some flowers to draw. Only to find that the first flower shop gets stocked in the afternoon and the second flower shop is gone. Driving to where the other flower shop used to be I found a shop with Indian artifacts.
This shop had several nice pots. One of which reminded me of a church window.

Church window

Do you like my work? Subscribe to See me draw

I don’t think a tree has any religious meaning but since I’m not jet very good in drawing people this seemed a saver choice.
Although the drawing turned out quite nice I wish I had taking a little less “save” shape to put on the window. The drawing process turned out to be a little boring.

Featured on See me draw

Amy Bennet constructed a town using model railroad miniatures, landscaping supplies and dollhouse lighting. From this model she paints pictures of the inside and outside of the houses and the people that could have lived in this town.

{ Comments on this entry are closed }

If you like the stories I tell. Or like the art and music I show. Feel free to leave a donation.

Strong feelings (drawing: Cliffside 1st sketch and Ravine 2th sketch)

by Henk ter Heide on Tuesday July 10, 2007

Tip of my tongue

Have you ever had that you know what you wanted to say but you just couldn’t remember the words.
In Dutch we talk about having something at the tip of ones tongue.

I have a lot this type of experience. Not with words but with pictures.
Sometimes when I try to remember someone, his face is gone. I know he has a face but I can’t remember it.
For years I was afraid that would mean that I wouldn’t recognize him the next time I’d meet him. Although I always did it still it frightened me.
Especially the fact that it almost always were people I liked a lot, whose face I couldn’t remember had me scared. (Although it’s quite possible that I also would have had this problem with people I didn’t like. Maybe I never noticed it because I don’t think as much about people I don’t like.)

Do you like my work? Subscribe to See me draw

When I try to draw a portrait from memory I run into the same problem. I can remember one detail of the face and when I try to concentrate on the rest of the face, everything disappears. The harder I try, the less I remember.
While the face is disappearing from my memory I feel that if I would see a picture or a drawing of him I would recognize him.

Next drawing

After trying my hand at a drawing of a fire I thought I go on with playing with color and shape and draw another rockface.

Cliffside 1st sketch

Building a drawing

After I drew this part I found something strange.
I have no idea what is to the left of this point.
I do know what is to the right of this point but I can’t see it in my mind. I can almost feel it. I have the same feeling as when I have something on the tip of my tongue.

Not knowing what’s to the left of this point isn’t really a problem. It just calls for a re-framing of the drawing. Just like you would with a photograph.
I just didn’t think it possible to get in the same situation when your drawing from memory.

As I told you before I have a kind of syntheses between seeing and feeling. While I’m looking at something I can chose to “touch” it with a kind of imagionary hand. When I do I have a strange all be very exciting feeling.

Not being able to see what is to the right of this point I used my imaginary hand to feel it and got very, very excited.

The problem with getting very excited is that I can’t sit still. I have to move. Go out and cycle for a bit or just bounce through my room. Which means that this drawing is turning out to be much more difficult than I had expected.

A second problem is that I have to decide on colors while I’m trying to feel my way round this rock formation. It wasn’t long before I realized that I had made a mistake. In the middle of the drawing is a red-brown patch. Just below there’s a dark brown patch. The dark brown patch should have been much lighter. I tried to save it by making the dark patch reddish but it didn’t work.

To give myself some grip I tried sketching a part with a graphic pencil.

Ravine 2th sketch

Usually if I find a sketch isn’t what I wanted I put it away and start anew. This time I put the sketch in front so I could see part of the landscape. I figured that would subdue the excitement and I would be able to finish the drawing.
But it didn’t work. Or actually it did work but not in the way I expected.

The feeling of excitement left me completely and was replaced with a feeling of complete boredom. I couldn’t concentrate on the drawing and within minutes I caught myself making a mistake.

The next morning while looking at the inside of my eyelids I saw the Cliffside as it should be.
I’m not sure whether I already have the technical skill necessary to draw this picture. I get back to it.

Hack

I’m finding that I have some difficulty in drawing parallel lines. Especially when they are more then a few centimeters apart.
To make this easier turn the sheet of paper till the first line is pointing straight down. When you draw your second line straight down it will be parallel to the first.
You can use almost the same technique to draw two lines at right angle. Just turn the paper till the first line is horizontal. Draw the second line straight down and you’ll have your right angle.

Link

I would never call this Youtube video art but I am sure you never saw anything like this. It sure gives a whole new meaning to the word food coloring (Couldn’t resist ).

{ Comments on this entry are closed }

If you like the stories I tell. Or like the art and music I show. Feel free to leave a donation.

Lose structure (drawing: Who’s afraid of yellow, red (and blue))

by Henk ter Heide on Thursday July 5, 2007

Fearing colors

Who is afraid of yellow red and blue (picture) is a famous painting by Barnett Newman I never quit understood. How could anybody be afraid of colors?

After drawing Tentacles I wanted to draw some more pictures were I could play with colors. A drawing of a fire seemed the logical next step.

But instead of starting with a drawing I started pacing my room. For some reason I couldn’t sit down and make this drawing.

Had this been a few months ago I’d probably would have stopped drawing all together. I would have concluded that some unknown force didn’t want me to draw. So why try.
But in the last few months I’ve learned that people with autism have feelings to. They just have great difficulty in recognizing them. I tend to have very strong physical reactions to feelings but it can take a few hours to a week before I recognize the feeling.

So instead of stopping all together I decided that there probably was something very frightening about this picture, that I couldn’t draw it. But it should be possible to draw something that resembled a fire but wouldn’t be frightening to me.
I started out with this sketch:

Who’s afraid of yellow, orange (and blue) 1st sketch

This picture looks nothing like a fire it just uses the colors.
But after drawing this much I found that it still was to frightening. So thinking that my fear might be caused by the colors I tried this drawing:

Who’s afraid of yellow, orange (and blue) 2th sketch

But again it got very frightening and I tried something else:

Who’s afraid of yellow, orange (and blue) 3th sketch

Here I’m almost drawing plants. What wasn’t what I had in mind.

Who’s afraid of yellow, orange (and blue) 5th sketch

With the 4th and 5th sketch I tried to get away from the plant shapes and back to the yellow and orange colors but I couldn’t figure out what was wrong with this drawing and why it coursed such violent emotions in me.
After using a whole day to draw five sketches I went to sleep.

Problems at work

The next day my employer, the sheltered workplace Promen (Dutch), tried to blindside me to force me to accept a move to one of their least structured departments.
For some reason I can’t phantom Promen seems to think that doing stupid mind numbing work makes a department structured when in actual fact it’s the manager that structures a department.
“Structured” means either that it’s very easy to predict how a day will run or that you have a great deal of control over the way your day plays out.
The problems with this manager is that he has a low self esteem which results in his ongoing attempts to prove who’s boss. He also has much trouble admitting mistakes.
I’ve known him to order people to preform tasks they weren’t qualified to do and then getting angry when they protested. (“WHEN I TELL YOU TO DO SOMETHING I EXPECT YOU TO DO IT!!!!”). I get very strong, unrecognized, feelings when I’m placed in that kind of a situation.
I’ve also known him to punish people for doing what he told them to do instead of what he meant.
If this wasn’t enough he also has a great mistrust of people. In his mind there’re always out to fool him. Once I witnessed how he refused a mentally impaired colleague sick leave stating that since he didn’t experience monthly pains she couldn’t either.
There’s no way I’m ever going to work at his department.
Luckily I recognized in time what was going on and I could get some help, but still I was very frightened for several days and couldn’t work on this drawing.

Where is the structure

About a week after I started I felt that I should give this drawing another try.
Almost at ones I realized that it wasn’t the colors that frightened me. It was the fact that I wanted to make a drawing that wouldn’t have any structure what so ever. Just putting some yellow and orange colors on the paper and see where it leads.
After I realized that it still took me several hours to finish this drawing.
I do like the result.

Who’s afraid of yellow, red (and blue)

Do you like my work? Subscribe to See me draw

Link

I still don’t know why Barnett Newman was afraid of yellow, red and blue. If you want to know more about this abstract painter this Wikipadia article is a nice place to start. I couldn’t find a site where you can see his work but by using this Google page you’ll find pictures of a lot of his paintings.

{ Comments on this entry are closed }

If you like the stories I tell. Or like the art and music I show. Feel free to leave a donation.

The long arm of Gil Hamilton (Drawing: Puke)

by Henk ter Heide on Saturday May 12, 2007

The Tardis materializes in the middle of my living room and Doctor Who and his friend come out. The Doctor turns on my TV set and while I’m looking at the Doctor who is saying goodbye to his friend I hear someone telling how he’s going to change what it means to be human.

A few days ago I told you that I don’t actually see pictures in my memory but that they are more like shapes.

Thinking some more about that I discovered that one of the problems with drawing my pictures is that I can’t imagine what a drawing would look like before I draw it. That is because a sheet of paper has no shape except for the flatness.

Puke

Do you like my work? Subscribe to See me draw

Next I thought I might try to imagine a drawing in the same way as I remember shows I’ve seen on the TV set. But then I realized that I don’t remember seeing a show on the TV. TV shows happen in my living room. I’m there while it happens.

“The long arm of Gil Hamilton” is a book by Larry Niven about a cop with a imaginary psychic arm he can stick through walls to feel and operate machines at the other side of those walls.

There used to be a time that I had tentacles growing out of my back. These tentacle touch everything I looked at. I felt everything I watched. I also had the feeling that I should be able to move objects just by thinking about it but that never happened.

About ten years ago I talk about it with a psychiatrist. He didn’t tell me I was mad but did ask a lot of questions that made clear how he felt about it.

After that I lost my tentacles. I don’t know whether that was because I wanted to be “normal” or that I just was to tired.

The last few days I’ve been experimenting with my tentacles. It does feel like I’m touching the objects I’m watch.

When I imagine touching something with a tentacle I feel a general shape. I can also imagine touching something with my hand and then I feel a little more detail. When I imagine using the tip of my finger I feel even more detail.

It isn’t something that just happens. I must make the effort to touch something with my imaginary hand.

It isn’t tiring. On the contrary. Every time I touch something using my imaginary hand I feel a kind of electric current going through my body. It’s a better feeling than orgasm.

It does explain something I never understood: When I look at something dirty I always felt the need to wash my hands. Now I understand that it isn’t a real hand that touches I can even “touch” this.

{ Comments on this entry are closed }

If you like the stories I tell. Or like the art and music I show. Feel free to leave a donation.

Changing the rules (Drawing: Doodle)

by Henk ter Heide on Saturday May 12, 2007

As per the agreement I have with Promen I’ve been working at the shop in Capelle a/d IJsel since last week monday.

I have to be at a meeting point in Gouda at 7 AM and they take me to capelle. Then at 4.30 PM they take me back.

Wednesday I came out of my work at 4.30 PM and found that the car was gone. I phoned the meeting point and was told that the car had been in Capelle till 4.15 PM when it had left as always. They had tried to contact me but I refused to leave my work. I told them that I was never contacted and they send a new car.

Doodle

Do you like my work? Subscribe to See me draw

Yesterday morning when I got to the meeting point I was greeted by a very angry manager of the transport department who asked me why I hadn’t been out in front of the building at 4.15 PM just as I had been told. I told him that nobody ever told me that I would be pick up at 4.15 PM but that I would discuss it with my the manager of my department.

The manager of my department didn’t like it. He thinks that since I’m paid to work till 4.30 PM I should work till 4.30 PM. Off course the manager of the transport department didn’t agree which led to a little mini war which was won by the manager of my department.

So now I’m very scared.

I’ve taken the day off.

The rule used to be that you’d put a notice on the desk of this manager and if there are objections he will tell you.

But it has been four weeks since I worked for this manager and it’s quite possible that he changed the rules and neglected to tell me about it. It’s quite possible that Promen will tell me next week that they won’t hold there end of the agreement because I didn’t play by the new rules.

Probably not, but it is possible.

I get very scared of these kinds of uncertainties.

{ Comments on this entry are closed }

If you like the stories I tell. Or like the art and music I show. Feel free to leave a donation.

Family ties (Drawing: Hole in the world)

by Henk ter Heide on Monday April 23, 2007

My father called a weeks ago to tell me that he had been ill for two weeks; nausea, diarrhoea, tired. Probebly some virus that is going round. He has gotten some pills from his docter and things were going better.

Last Friday I called him for some problem but before I got the change to talk about it he told me that he was still sick. This is the third week of the two week flu. It has me a bit worried.

Probebly everything is alright but he is 76 (or 78 I keep forgetting) and although he is generaly in good health he isn’t fit. He Couldn’t run the 100 metres if his live depended on it.

Every now and then I think about what would happen if my father would die.

Hole in the world

Do you like my work? Subscribe to See me draw!

I would lose all my ties with the family. My mother and sister died 18 years ago. I have some cousins but I have hardly any contact with them. My father has. So if something happens in the family I hear it via my father.

In some sence I would also lose contact with the world.

I don’t have a great need for contact with people. So I don’t make many friends. I talk to my colleagues and up till a few days ago I talked to the people in my pub. But they aren’t my friends.

After the fight in my pub I did some thinking about why I go there. I feel like I have a limited dose of energie to spent in talking with people. If I spent it talking to people I don’t like I won’t have anything left to talk with people I do like.

I’ve decide not to go to this pub anymore. Hopefully it will give me the need to talk with people I do like.

But for the moment that means that apart from my father I don’t have any contact with people I like.

So if my father would die in the next couple of weeks I would lose all my ties with the world.

And then there is the financial problem. Doing unskilled labor I don’t make very much money. So when I’m in a jam I go to my father.

When he dies I inherit a lot of money. So I’ld have to manage that money or find someone to do that for me.

But going to some finacial adviser when you’re in a jam isn’t the same as calling your father.

{ Comments on this entry are closed }

If you like the stories I tell. Or like the art and music I show. Feel free to leave a donation.

Depth (Drawing: Landscape somewhere in Limburg)

by Henk ter Heide on Sunday February 18, 2007

For the second assiment the teacher had a picture of a landscape somewhere in Limburg.

Again I didn’t dare to start. The teacher actualy commented on the fact that I was a slow drawer. She suggested that I use a smaller peace of paper then the 70 x 40 cm sheets we use at the course so I could finish a drawing.

What you see here is the drawing I made at home on a A4 sheet. (Actualy I had already decided to draw on A4 paper because my scanner isn’t big enough for larger sheets of paper.)

Landscape somewhere in Limburg

The purpose of this drawing is to practise the different techniques to suggest depth.

Do you like my work? Subscribe to See me draw!

{ Comments on this entry are closed }

If you like the stories I tell. Or like the art and music I show. Feel free to leave a donation.