One of the reasons I like having a home for a while is that I can fully embrace my inner granny and have a couple of hobbies. A weekly appointment to get my hands dirty and clay all worries away in the ceramics studio. Learn burlesque dance moves while trying to balance on top of a chair in heels. And of course, the good ol’ fashioned drawing class.
As a child I used to draw from dawn til dusk. No imaginary land was left behind, I would put it all on paper. Often the images came with little poems, and even though I still love writing poetry, the drawing side of life vanished into a great big cloud of fog. What happens when you haven’t touched a pencil for nearly twenty years? You try and draw and what comes out looks exactly like what you were scribbling down twenty years ago. Time passed but the drawing skill stood still.
Two years ago I got gifted a wonderful book by a Canadian artist friend. Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain is the title and it’s been travelling with me all this time. I leafed through it, I even did some of the exercises, but when I got to the part where I actually had to draw, I chickened out.
So now, years later, I picked up this book and marvelled at the way Betty Edwards describes the learning to draw: by shifting to a particular way of seeing. By moving to the right side of the brain, you experience a slightly altered state of awareness, to see things in a different way. Sounds like Betty is here to add some magic to my city life. J
She quotes Edward Hill (The Language of Drawing): “To empty one’s mind of all thought and refill the void with a spirit greater than oneself is to extend the mind into a realm not accessible by conventional processes of reason.” In learning how to draw, I’m learning how to get psychedelic. This book has got me hooked.