DRAWING

I have started drawing again recently, feeling a need for some input.

. The olive grove that surrounds the house is a wonderful treasure chest of line and shapes and over the past fortnight I have spent a few hours a day trying to get my eye hand co-ordination working at a reasonable level.

As an extra activity I have had some enjoyment scanning  these sketches onto the computer and  playing around with them on photoshop. 

I was never one of those children who had the ability to conjure up life-like sketches of animals that caused adults to lavish them with praise of artistic talents. In fact I became an artist by accident, having incorrectly filled in a college application form I found myself enrolled in the art department instead of the maths department of a college of education. I had not even studied art to A level standard at school.

When the drawing lessons started I remember feeling extremely apprehensive because I couldn’t draw I could only make ugly marks on paper that didn’t look like anything. To my great surprise and relief  the  A level art students around me came in for more criticism than me for their rigid stylised forms of drawing. The tutor kept insisting that drawing was about looking, not about producing neat little sketches. I hid at the back listened, but didn’t understand and in the end got myself excused and allowed to go back to the sculpting.

A few years later, living in the countryside I decided to try drawing again, and those things the tutor had said, not understood by me at the time, started to make sense, the idea of drawing as a way of wakening the visual senses.  Drawing became a part of my everyday life for many years after, though not producing drawings that you would want on your living room wall, it was an activity I looked on as visual training, at its best a way of intensely observing the world.

Somehow as the years went on I got out of the habit of drawing regularly, so that when I did occasionally try it was difficult, in the way that keeping fit is not something you can do by exercising once a month, to keep your eye and hand working together you need to do it a little everyday.  

From "The Baptism" by Francesco  della Francesca

Since the arrival of computers  I have spent  some time using a computer to make drawings, starting with a photograph and abstracting and playing around  using photoshop.  Computer drawings on the website

Abstracting from a photo

The computer is a very useful tool if  kept under control, 

But if given a chance it can often take control and run away with things.