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.