I am back – well, for now, who knows what the world will bring us!
I am not sure why I stopped producing this blog, it was an interesting exercise and method of reflecting on my art as I progressed. I think I was overwhelmed with activity and could not keep it all up.
At the time I stopped blogging, in an art forum some comment I made in all innocence was responded to with aggression. This gave me pause to re-think why I bother with the internet and a global audience of people so far away I will never actually meet them!
My response to the events outlined above was to join a few local art associations and begin a ‘daily pages’ process. Daily pages, is a process advocated by Julia Cameron in her book ‘The Artist’s Way’. The book progresses into a more spiritual area which did not appeal to me, but the ‘daily pages’ worked for me up to a point.
‘Daily Pages’ involves writing three pages of A4 text to yourself every day. I started getting up at five in the morning and doing just that. I have filled three A4 exercise books with text since then. However, during the latter part of 2024, I thought that perhaps I should write two pages and draw on the third one.
I spent several months producing a small drawing a day, mainly copied from an art book or elsewhere as the mood took me. I started using material from a book by Loomis on figure and faces. For instance, the one above and the one below.
I used other books and material mainly concentrating on the head and figure and over time the style of drawing improved. It was certainly a worthwhile process to follow. The image below was one of the later in the year, practice my not make perfect but it certainly improves the output.
One day I became so caught up in the process that instead of staying within my morning time box, I spent the best part of the day on a drawing of a bird. That image is presented below.
Some of these images were shared on WhatsApp with a local group of artists. The bird drawing was one of them. The lady who organizes that group showed my drawing to a mutual friend and he asked her “what the lines across the page were?”! My response, all via the group on WhatsApp, was that I used an exercise book and those were the lines for writing on. This caused uproar, I was told in no uncertain terms that it was a ‘sin’ to produce art on such paper and I should be using suitably blank sheets for my art. I was duly chastised.
My response to the group of concerned artists was to redraw the image on A3 size art paper. I added a dark background to enhance the three-dimensional effect and that drawing now hangs in a frame on the wall above my desk.
Will this be my last blog post. I don’t know. Since retiring and moving to a small coastal town I have become involved in a camera club, a model building club, a walking club, and assisting a friend open up new walking trails. The latter involves visiting and then describing the geology of the trail. Perhaps in a future blog I will describe the production of a drawing of a Gorgonopsian.
