incredibly diicult place to exist but once you’ve
been there and achieved results beyond your own
supposed capabilities (it will happen) as a result
you become quickly addicted to the premise and
ind everything of-tundra tedious and annoying to
the point of nerve twitching apoplexy. Ironically
this leads to wanting nothing more than to go back
out on the tundra where it’s all but impossible
to mentally survive indeinitely because of the
relentlessly harsh mental terrain.
Hi Brett,
Do you ever feel guilty spending so much time on
art? I ind it so hard to clear my head.
Regards, Marion
Hi Marion,
Not so much now I’ve warped my entire existence
to that end but I sure do know what you mean
from past experience. There’s diferent kinds of
guilt too. The stuf that involves the other humans
close enough to you for it to matter, the kind that
has you feeling guilty on your own behalf doing art
when there’s all those endless ‘more important’
things you should/would/could be doing ‘because
you’re supposed to’. Then there’s the self inlicted
kind, the one you feel when you’ve planned the
whole day for drawing but somehow ind yourself
watching daytime TV and eating honey with a
spoon instead. It’s all a case of management,
the same intense feelings that made you feel bad
for drawing instead of other ‘more productive’
activities are the same ones that motivate the
creative drive to start with. Once you’re seriously
engaged on your artistic path you feel guilty doing
anything BUT art. Art is many things, and ‘hard to
do successfully’ is deinitely one of them. It doesn’t
do itself and that damn clock just does not stop
ticking. So use your guilt like a freshet of tingling
creative energy to grate your motivation and
perception up against, and let it help you get you
back to the drawing board just as much as it can
get you away from it. If you didn’t care enough
to feel guilt you wouldn’t care enough to bother
creating art. I reckon there’s a good reason ‘guilty’
and ‘pleasure’ are words that go so well together.
Enjoy the tang of some nice fresh guilt, as long as it
has you picking up the pencil, not putting it down,
BrettHi Brett,
In regards to drawing freehand, how do you really
know when it’s ‘right’? It seems to me no matter
how far I go there is always more to do or I even
just start moving the same things back and forth
without ever really being happy with it,
Cheers, Bronwyn.Hi Bronwyn,
That’s what (one of the things) makes freehand
drawing and to an extent all original artistic
endeavour such a magically creative concept and
challenge, you really don’t ever truly know when
it’s ‘right’, ‘perfect’, or even ‘inished’ because
those states just don’t exist in original ine art.
If the entire process from the beginning is
completely freehand the ininite possibilities for
variation make it for all intents and purposes well
nigh impossible to be able to ‘call it’ inished in
any meaningful way. In fact the endless variation
in proportion, detail, and suggested texture in
any given freehand drawing you do is one of the
things which make it truly unique and the purest
kind of artistic process. You really do end up
with your ‘best impression’ of the subject. You’ll
never get it ‘perfect’ (whatever that means) but
if you ind you are going round in circles moving
the same things but nothing seeming to be falling
into place it’s usually a good time to look for a
proportional cause on a bigger scale or a series
of smaller proportional errors distorting the entire
layout. Be brutally honest about what is really
above, below, left, and right, of each individual
feature on the subject and don’t let existing lines
dictate the drawing’s further progress.
Cheers, Brett.If you have a question for Brett, send it to: From the Drawing Board
Email: [email protected]
Text: 0401 543 327