by Henk ter Heide on Monday August 17, 2009
I feel trapped.
My job is boring and pointless.
My favorite bar is about to go belly up (although the owner still doesn’t know it).
I have hardly any friends.
I hardly ever talk to the kind of people I like to talk with.
I’ve got to get out of here.
Being autistic I’m told that I lack the skills that are necessary to find a new job.
Maybe so. But you never really know until you’ve tried, do you.
So I decided that even if I don’t find a job I should try. If only because you always learn something from trying.
On Monsterboard I found the question “Where do you want to be in five years?”
Thinking about that I realized that’s one of my problems.
I’m only 47 yrs and I live in the past. (We all do at the sheltered workplace.)
I’m always thinking about what went wrong. What aspects of my autism lead me to the place I’ve ended up.
But that’s a dead end.
Knowing how I got here will never help me to get on.
Not with my life.
And not with my art.
If you like the stories I tell. Or like the art and music I show. Feel free to leave a donation.
by Henk ter Heide on Sunday February 1, 2009
winter symphony
Posted on Flickr by wystemd
[***]
Posted on Flickr by Camera Photo Factory
Lunar eclipse
Posted on Flickr by paolo_marcato
“Swimming Hole”
Posted on Flickr by outragousart2008
If you like the stories I tell. Or like the art and music I show. Feel free to leave a donation.
by Henk ter Heide on Wednesday August 13, 2008
Thinking about drawing in my future.
A few weeks ago Steve Pavlina wrote something that was both very obvious and very true, but I had never thought about it.
In essences he wrote that time passes. In ten years, ten years will have passed. Which is obvious.
He continued to say that in ten years you will have gathered ten years of experience. Which is also obvious but I never realized that.
In ten years time I will have gathered ten years of experience in what ever it is that I’m doing.
If I spent the next ten years watching TV and doing video games I will have gathered experience in watching TV and gaming. Which is not something I aspire to.
But if I spend only 15 minutes a day drawing. In ten years I will have done thousands of drawings and gained a lot of experience.
Of course when I read this I was in the middle of my blind spot (maybe if I name it I’ll recognize it next time) and I didn’t know what to draw.
But I figured that even if I where to draw gibberish (521-1) I still would be gaining drawing experience. Or at least I would get into the habit of drawing daily.
Having thought some more about it I now feel that it would be nice to spent somewhere between 15 minutes and one hour a day working either on drawings or writing reviews. Because it usually takes more then one day to finish a drawing and I do like to show what I’m working on I’ll be scanning half drawings.
This also led me to a problem I have been running into before. What to name drawings?
I imagine that famous painters like our Rembrandt didn’t name every sketch and experiment he drew. It is getting rather trying to find an original title for every drawing I do especially if some of my drawings will only be gibberish.
The easiest way around this is to number them. And so I don’t get confused I’ll just use the number WordPress gives an article if you don’t name it.
If you like the stories I tell. Or like the art and music I show. Feel free to leave a donation.
by Henk ter Heide on Saturday February 23, 2008
Making a decision about the future of this blog.
I’m finding that I’m slowly getting to a point of which I naively thought I would never reach it.
When I started this blog I thought that I would be drawing beautiful pictures without ever having to practice technique. Since I have a photographic memory I thought that I only had to draw what I saw.
But it doesn’t work that way. To draw what you see you need a fair amount techniques I don’t have.
So a few weeks ago I spent a few days drawing circles. I didn’t blog about it because I thought it wouldn’t be very interesting if I blog about the same subject 10 days in a row.
But last week I didn’t do any drawings and I remembered that there was an important reason why I started this blog at about the same time as I started drawing:
I need a way to publish my drawings. Even if I’m only do boring practice drawings I still need to publish them. If I don’t I get the feeling that I’m doing something that is without purpose and I stop doing it.
So I’ve gotten to the point where I have to take a decision both about drawing and about blogging. Either I stop doing both or I continue practicing my drawing and write articles that probably will be rather boring.
A few months ago I would probably have chosen the first option but in the last few months I’ve noticed that my readers are very picky. They only read the article that are of interest to them and ignore the rest. So I think I could get away with writing 10 articles about freehand circle drawing without any one noticing it.
If you like the stories I tell. Or like the art and music I show. Feel free to leave a donation.