More new work

I'm taking a three-hour studio class once a week now, every week a new model. Right now, making sense of the human body takes breaking it down into geometric forms--its how my eye seems to see.

New work

Art is an antidote

A man sat at the next table--in his seventies, surel,y with a pinky ring that looked like it was out of a Cracker Jack box. A slender gold band with a giant red stone.

He sipped coffee and took bites of pumpkin bread--opting to use a fork, when I'd have just used my fingers.

He slipped a pair of glass on his nose.

"I want to draw him," I thought, imagining the satisfaction of capturing the bags under his eyes, the broom of stubble on his chin.

At the table next to him, six senior citizens--the women clustered at one end, the men at the other hovered over the newspaper.

These were interesting faces. Faces I wouldn't think twice about before taking a drawing class, I'd favored the smooth faced beauties in fashion magazines. Pretty. Fresh. But young faces have nothing to dig into, nothing to capture with the lights and darks of charcoal and eraser.

Art is the antidote to our beauty- and, youth-obsessed culture. All those anorexic, self-loathing girls and boys out there should just take a drawing class. Learn to see to creased and flappy bodies and faces, lined and stretched, dented and bent in a different way. Captivating.

Self portrait

In this evening's class we created a bizarre self portrait, working for 20 minutes at a time on just a small section of our face. We folded the paper into quarters, and started with the left eye and bridge of the nose, then the right, then the bottom part of the nose and part of the mouth, then the other part of the mouth.

We set things up so that our features would be out of proportion intentionally.  The mouth and eyes cock-eyed. Features pulled and squished.

Drawing like this makes me wonder if I can write like this.

More drawings

We have moved from graphite to charcoal, which proves to be much more forgiving.

I've always been intimidated by charcoal, but now that I understand a bit more about how to work with it, I love it. 

This first image is a composite. The left eye is Lauren Bacall's. The nose is Quincy Jones'. And the mouth and right eye from two others--combined to create a harsh looking individual, but I was amazed at what I'd created anyway.

The second and third image are from my last class. I spent most of the class working on the old man, and all of about 10 minutes on the old woman. Nevertheless, I think I captured her essence much more accurately--perhaps because I was working so quickly and not worrying too much .

Intro to drawing

I'm taking a drawing class. I've always loved drawing, but beyond art class in school, I've never had any formal instruction.

Not that my class is "formal." It's as informal and loose as it can get. Phil Sylvester's approach is to get you to shut down that internal censor, not worry about trying to reproduce what you're trying to draw, but closely observe and let your instincts take care of the rest.

In class # 2, we looked closely at each part of our faces using a little hand-held mirror. Phil asked us just to make marks on the paper--scribbles really--where we saw something. So I wasn't even trying to make an "eye," or a "nose" or a "mouth." I was just recording lights and darks and interesting places I saw on the paper.

We used a new sheet of paper for every part--so we could make giant eyes and noses and mouths. I drew several of each. And then at the end, we cut out the ones we liked best and glued them together to make a "face." Here's mine:

If you look closely, you'll see it really is scratches and scribbles. The mouth is mostly a series of vertical lines. I love that together, it looks like a crazy face.

Images from class 3 and 4 soon!

Excuses, excuses

I've been in a writing funk lately--where I want to write, but I think "I don't know what to write about," so I just do something else. What the hell? When has not knowing what to write ever stopped me before?

So I'll just write about my life. About what's right in front of me. No agenda. No big reveal. Just writing down the bones.

The kitchen window is open. I turned the heat back on yesterday, and I keep discovering windows open around the house. Last night, I walked into the bedroom and saw the curtains billowing out from the wind. My mind mother scolds me for wasting energy.

I started a new big project yesterday. Last week, I gave up everything I was doing, rolled it all up and handed it to someone else. My status as manager. My client work. One week passes and I am a new person. It's a good experience to have now and then. No one really needs me. The work goes on without me, and people will find their way, not matter what that is.

When my parents retired, they were both so scared to leave their jobs. They didn't know what to do with themselves. But I could hear another question they weren't asking out loud. "Who am I without my job?" I couldn't imagine it. I pitied them for not seeing retirement as a giant gift. Free time to do projects, complete their own work, and follow their own passions. But I can see how it happens. Years and years of being the person with the answers. The person who needs to be at the meeting. It's tricky. You start believing that's why you're important.

When I was going through Lionheart, I had a revalatory moment and wrote this down:
*I* am important.
I am not *important.*

Meaning, there's really no function out in the world that I alone can fill, nothing that is so worth the cost of losing myself. It's my experience on this planet that counts.

It sounds selfish, but actually, it's the opposite of selfish. Thinking you are *important* is actually the selfish thing. That's the ego talking--and it tells you no one can live without you. It adds layers of meaning on top of your identity, to the point where you are no longer you, you're a writer, a creative director, a manager, a leader, an expert, blah blah blah. And those meanings remove you from you.

I like stripping away the meaning now and then. It brings me back to why I am here. Which is maybe why I am writing this morning after all, no longer able to hide behind that curtain of "I'm so busy, so stressed, so important so I don't have time to write/can't think of what to write." I am just me, a person up too early and sitting at the kitchen table, coffee in hand, feeling the itch to write, and taking a moment to scratch.

Why I write and why I don't do drugs

Last week I went to hear Ruth Ozeki read from her new novel, A Tale for the Time Being. I love the Q&A session at these type of events, sometimes even more than the reading. I love the little glimpses into the lives and personalities of the authors. And I am always amazed at how open they are, and how genuine and human they seem to be. They tell little jokes. Make funny comments. Just talk, like the real people they are. Ozeki was delightful. She told stories about how her characters come to her. And about how she rewrote A Tale several times before she got it right.

Sometimes I pretend I am the one up there answering questions from an audience of readers. Today, on my way to work, I was enjoying this daydream. I conjured up a fan who asked me the question "What motivates you to write?"

Here was my answer:

Two things. The first: I can't help myself. Sometime it takes me years to write a story. But it's there. And I can't stop thinking about it. I work on it for awhile, and decide it's not right. But it keeps coming back. Eventually, maybe years after the first idea comes to me, I get another one. The idea that allows the story to be told. But all that time, the story just kind of hovers, looking for a place to land. Right now I've got three stories I keep thinking about. I know I will eventually rewrite two of them, and finish the other. But right now they are hovering.

The second: death. This may seem like a tangent, but I promise, it will connect. I don't do drugs. I certainly enjoy the buzz of a strong margarita or two, but nothing more than that. In college, I did pot once. I ate some pot brownies that friends of mine made. And maybe I ate too much of one, or it was too strong (my friend did spend several days cooking the weed in oil in order to get every drop of THC possible and then used the oil to make the brownies) but it was a bad ride. I sat on the floor of my friend's room and I'm sure it was just the drug messing with my short term memory, but it felt like I'd open a door, then head down a hallway, then open another door and head down another hallway. I couldn't make it stop. The doors just kept opening.

After that, I was scared to die. Because that bad trip was what I imagined death to be: always stuck in a loop of nothingness. No past, no future. Eternal present.

How very zen. And being stuck in the present is probably why most people do drugs--to escape from the pain of past failures or the anxiety of the future. But the present means nothing without the past. And it doesn't mean anything withou a future either. 

I never did pot or anything else again. It was horrifying.

Death is the mother of beauty, wrote Wallace Stevens. I guess that experience of feeling dead, made everything more beautiful to me. Even the pain that comes with being human--it means something. And writing about that beauty that I see and feel, before at some point, I see and feel nothing, seems incredibly important.