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This is a ten minute sketch from about two months ago. I kept reworking the face because it looked like she was looking down while the model looked like she was looking up. I just came off of 5 very intense days of work at the rehab hospital, at the end of which was the Wednesday evening life drawing session I was determined to make it to, it's what I look forward to most each week. I took a quick shower but when I found myself still sitting in my robe on the couch staring into space at the same time drawing begins, I knew I had to surrender to the exhaustion.
I don't like to interrupt the rhythm of projects on my blog but I am so overbooked these days that I won't be able to get back to drawing until the end of next week. It brought this image to mind, a weary looking model propped on a cane, and how I had to rework the face to get her to look up instead of down. I like how her right foot looks like its solidly planted on the ground as if it's not giving up despite the weariness.
I like to listen to the sounds of charcoal on paper as we move progressively from a one to a twenty minute pose. Short poses bring quick, scratchy sounds, as if the charcoal is racing with the panic and excitement that comes when there is not enough time. Long poses bring slower sounds, you can almost hear the charcoal groan over the thinking of its artist. With more time there is more time to worry about getting it right.
To my new followers here at Daily Art Works, thank you and welcome to my quiet corner of the internet, I'm really glad you stopped by. It was three years ago this month that I started out on an amazing Road Trip (the story starts at the bottom of the link). I jumped through a window of opportunity in order to spend some time attending to things I've always wanted to do, such as painting in Philadelphia or writing on the coast of Maine. And to take time to visit people I've loved throughout my life along the way. It took four months to live and a year and a half to write about it.
When I started out I thought it would be more like a bucket list, putting some things to rest before I started my new professional life. I didn't know at the time that I was really planting seeds and dreaming my way into being all that I wanted to be.
Ah, Memorial Day, A day of remembering and rest (except that I've been working all weekend, including today). I don't get the rest right now but I can still have the memories and one of my favorite ones is the Memorial Day I spent three years ago with my favorite Indy 500 fans at the beginning of the road trip of a life time. I also remember my old cell phone, the unexpected painter who came along and told the tale in the most poetic way.
When I took the painting workshop at Studio Incamminati three years ago, one of the instructors told us if we kept practicing, just kept going through that awful muddy phase, we would start to get glimpses, little areas of our paintings where something starts to come alive. And we wouldn't even know what it is was we did. Then, as we noticed the glimpses more and more, we would also start noticing what it is we did that made them happen, and then we could do it again and before we knew it we would really be painting.
The model looked like she was gazing at the clouds when she took this pose. I couldn't quite capture the look of ease the model had, but I was thrilled that I went for it all because it turned out to be very difficult to draw a face from this angle. I like how her hand turned out too.
I love this drawing. It looks like she's hailing a cab, or waiting to be called on in a nudist class, but in reality she was holding onto a frame that was overhead. A bit of a poor compositional choice there, but what I love about this drawing is her lower back and butt. Something is happening there with light and line and texture that makes the form really come alive. I like to look at drawings and paintings and notice the parts that work, even when there are other parts that don't.
All this talk of bones reminds me of a post I once wrote called Resting Place. The brain and bones use more oxygen than other tissues of the body. When we are constantly worrying, thinking, and planning, we're actually stealing blood from our bones.
I love Tara's comment on last week's drawing of the sphenoid. In my work as a therapist, one thing that's challenging but necessary to convey is that we are so much more alive than we realize. When we think of bone we tend to think dry, hard, white. But that's dead bone. We are made of living bone which is always being formed and modified. Bones form by the pull of muscle, muscles move at the command of the nervous system, and the nervous system responds, most often, to the pull of our perception.
Just over the half way point of this project and I can feel my comfort level with drawing a face and not worrying about it start to increase. I also came up with a vision statement to help me stay focused amidst the feelings of overwhelm I get from all the directions I'm trying to go. Perhaps spending a few days with the sphenoid helped. Here it is:
Draw the drawings you want to see. Write the book you want to read. Teach the classes you wish you could take. Run the business you would love to support.
This is the sphenoid as seen from the side. The following is a fascinating example of how energetics can affect structure, from "The Heart of Listening" by Hugh Milne.
Sphenoid torsion is body language for "being all twisted up" or "torn apart" by conflicting loyalties. This often occurs in children whose parents are fighting; the child, for security reasons, wants to take a side, but cannot because of conflicting feelings of loyalties to both parents. Imagine the child's head looking first at mom, then at dad... The bone has no peace. Something has to give, and the sphenoid ends up being torqued to one side.
From this angle I was taken with how much the sphenoid really does look like a bat. Bats are the totem of shaman, a symbol of death and rebirth, and learning to trust your intuition. This bone is sitting right there in the center of your head and when you're facing someone this is what's looking back! The tips of the wings at each side are your temples. All the little holes are for cranial nerves and sinuses and things.
Life drawing was cancelled for the last two weeks and I was out of town for one so I've been left without a model to draw. This coincided perfectly with reading in one of my craniosacral books that the best way to understand the sphenoid bone is to draw it from a few different angles.
The sphenoid is the bone that is in the very center of your head. It touches every other bone in the cranium. It's said to look like a dragonfly or a bat. In Japanese it's known as "Cho Kay Hotsu," the butterfly bone. It is considered the visionary bone. The front of your brain sits right on top of it and nestled in a little saddle in the middle is the pituitary gland. Further back and deeper in the center of the brain is the pineal gland, also considered the third eye, relating to intuition and perception.The pineal gland is shaped like a pine cone and what's really cool is it's actually filled with rods and cones just like your regular eyes.
Yesterday I felt so agitated about the uncertainties of life but I knew I had to do a drawing nonetheless. I decided to draw the divine mother in honor of Mother's Day, and turned to a photo of la Virgen de la Soledad from Oaxaca. I was frustrated with the way it looked after scanning so I decided to take a photo. I liked the juxtaposition of the mundane clipboard and masking tape with a holy image, and the shadow of the vine at the bottom.
Then what caught my eye was the crack in the sidewalk. It brought to mind the question I asked when I started the project of drawing 100 heads. Can watering the seeds of what you love crack the concrete? It felt like a good sign on a day of agitation with all the unknowns.
Last night, after posting about the power of vulnerability, I watched an episode of the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. Brandi was crying about the pain of her cheating husband ultimately leaving her for LeeAnn Rimes. Then she clenched her jaw, held her breath, and declared to Lisa that no matter what she felt she would not, under any circumstances, let her two sons see her be vulnerable. It's amazing how scary it is to really be real.
It's my 50th post, which means I'm halfway through my project of drawing 100 heads. When I started this project in February, I wondered what it would be like now in May. I'd hoped for long afternoons of drawing portraits but I can barely find the time for quick gestures. It turns out that having a day job, running your own business, and being an artist is a lot to do at all once. This project has become less about learning how the frontal bone relates to the nasal bone, and more about how to keep drawing at all in the midst of modern life.
I've become less afraid of drawing faces, however, and now find them the first place I go instead of the place I most try to avoid. I still feel the panic, during life drawing sessions, of seeing a face and thinking "I don't know how to draw that!" but the difference is that now I try to draw it anyway, despite that feeling. And then I come here and post them despite how I may feel about that too. It brings to mind Brene Brown's amazing TED talk on the the power of vulnerability, a reminder to myself in those times where I think if only I had the time, I could really be good at this, to just keep going, keep drawing, keep posting, wholeheartedly.
I've been fascinated by ribs these days. I remember both Sherrie McGraw and Rob Liberace pointing out that when drawing breasts it's important to draw the ribs in order for them to have a form to lay on. Even if you don't actually see it. That's something I captured in this gesture.
As a therapist I find that almost every client is amazed that their ribs go all the way around their body. Of course we know it intellectually but we don't tend to feel it, we tend to feel like our ribs are just in the front. When we breathe well our ribs expand and contract, when we don't, they don't. This is why back stiffness can often be alleviated simply by breathing well.
I like how this gesture shows both movement and stillness at once. It snowed 8 inches when I was in Boulder and I loved it. I stayed a few blocks off Pearl Street and didn't have to drive for 4 days. I walked everywhere, along the river path, to Dushanbe Tea house and to the Boulder Bookstore where I found a great book by Jen Sincero called "You are a Badass. How to Stop Doubting Your Greatness and Start Living an Awesome Life."
She points out that when someone asks you how you are, "Good, but busy!" seems to be the new "Fine, thanks." She also writes about the importance of taking care of your body because, "During our little sojourn here on earth, we need our bodies more than they need us...we, if you're anything like me, run around doing all our busy work with our poor bodies flapping behind us like old wind socks."
When I took Lynda Barry's workshop, the one where she taught us the beautiful technique of writing down 10 images from our day, she said it would take 30 minutes to do the assignment. That's 10 minutes to pace around trying to avoid doing it, 10 minutes to actually write down the images, and 10 minutes to freak out that you actually did it.
That's how I feel about vacation. There's vacation, then there's the week after where you're between two worlds, amazed at what you experienced and not quite ready to be back. This is a different drawing than the last one. Sometimes I like to take long poses and break them up into short ones, to learn something new each time. Our model is not quite convinced that vacation is over either.
