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I made a drawing of a flower today

by Bodil Eide · Sunday, April 5th, 2009 at 4:04 pm

I made a drawing of a flower today. We all did, sitting down, scattered between bushes and rocks on Europe’s most western point, sea stretching out below us. We were on a Sketchbook Walk.

It was given as a very simple task…

Just look at the flower and don’t make up any ideas about it. Don’t know anything about it. Don’t think about it. Just look at it and know that as your pencil finds its way along the lines you see, the drawing will start making sense. You might get lost, finding your drawing doesn’t match with the way the leaves grow. Just continue, keep insisting on the searching and following of the eye along the flower. The pencil roams slowly, figuring out as it goes. An honest drawing, with no presupposing of knowing it beforehand and with no need to impress anyone.

The brain, addicted to adrenaline, and dull from daily overstimulation, is having a hard time. The eyes skip around the flower, looking for patterns, a system to simplify it by, get it over with.

‘yeah, I get this part, it goes straight, I’ll just skip to the yellow petals, now that’s a challenge”.

“I bet I can use my fancy markmaking and do this texture”…

Do it slower, draw painstakingly slow for a few minutes. Let your eyes move as a small ant would, walking across it. Let your pencil do the same line as your eyes, feel the exact coordination. There is nothing else right now, just this line happening, millimeter by millimeter. Just you and the flower.

Something happens, a shift inside. Like the flower is actually there, before me. No words are going through my mind anymore. It is just an intense following, physically feeling the point of the pencil making my eyes’ path real, pushing against the paper, stronger and weaker as the flower grows from thick stem to delicate petals. There is an intense joy, that I can only describe as related to childhood. It has no purpose and no knowledge attatched to it. It is an appreciation of something filling your sensory horizon, putting you right in the middle of time, where time dissappears.

I look at the drawing and I can’t believe how odd and beautiful it is. I didn’t do this..The flower did.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, April 5th, 2009 at 4:04 pm and is filed under Arts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One Response to “I made a drawing of a flower today”

slowdownnow
May 13th, 2009 at 9:20 am

What an elegant drawing! It’s sad that so many adults are harsh with themselves around the subject of drawing. Who hasn’t heard the lament: I can’t draw. I don’t have talent. Yet young children are immersed in the activity of drawing. It consumes them. They are in a state of flow.

I remember drawing as a little boy in my village school. It was a total somatic event. The whole body was involved. And I wasn’t the only one. Drawing was a noisy affair. We made sounds that accompanied the image that was emerging on the paper. It seemed magical. Perhaps drawing is magic?

I’ve taken a lot of drawing classes over the years. Surprisingly, drawing wasn’t taught at my art school in Winchester in the 1970’s. Figurative work as seen as anachronistic.

Several years later after moving to California I took classes at the San Francisco Academy of Art. And your flower reminds me of the classes where we would look at the model the whole time we were drawing and not at our paper. When you slow down, you see more. You create new brain maps. This subject is a bit to complex to go into here.

However,the exercise of drawing without looking at your paper, and keeping you pencil on the paper at all times, helps you get over this ‘adult’ judgmental attitude that is so limiting.

Betty Edwards books, Drawing on the right side of the brain, and Drawing on the artist within fit right into the slow canon. I recommend them.

Art has no purpose other than to be what it is. And to appreciate that, we need to slow down.

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