Drawing
When people are introduced to me-as-an-artist, about half of them say: "Oh, you're an artist. That's so amazing. I can't even draw a straight line."
You know what? As an artist, I've never needed to draw a straight line.
I can, but it never comes up.
Drawing and painting got a lot more interesting after the invention of the camera. Now the photograph carries the burden of documenting our times. Drawing and painting are free to be "about" things rather than just "of" them.
I'm terrified of painting. All that craft, all that choice, all that heritage. At the same time, it's such a seductive activity. Every couple of years I buy paints, for no reason. I just have to have them, have to have the possibility of painting present in the studio at all times.
If, however, I tell myself that I am drawing (with paint) than I'm fine.
I love drawing. I love to draw in the edges of notebooks, on the cover of the telephone book, on chalkboards and whiteboards, on the sidewalk. I love to draw on paper, and walls, and boards, and people's faces. I love doodles, and massive collages, and working drawings, and classical figure drawing, and scrubby little charcoal landscape sketches. Abstract, representational, any material at all.
The great thing about teaching drawing is helping people recover their ability to draw. I believe drawing is a fundamental human activity, and we seem to stamp it out of most folks by the time they're ten years old. Drawing isn't about being able to make a straight line, it's about learning to see.
And when you learn to see, seeing becomes an adventure.
Here are a couple of my big black drawings. For extra credit, techies in the crowd should look for math/science references:
big black pig studio
98 King Street North, Upper
Waterloo, Ontario
Canada N2J 2X4
+1 519 884-7355