a collection of daily paintings and drawings

Tuesday, February 24, 2015

HOW DRAWING SAVED MY LIFE portraits from my drawing group


Bonnie
pencil on white paper

I named this drawing "Princess Bonnie" because it reminds me of those sweetly flattering drawings that artists at Disneyland used to draw when I was a kid. 


`
Quincy
charcoal and conte on grey paper

Quincy has an adorable crooked smile that I tried to capture, though it looks somewhat like a smirk here. So pretty and smart; I could draw her for hours and hours. Speaking of which, most of my drawings are completed in 1-1.5 hours.

Most drawings that look like this: (by Sabin Howard)
take considerably longer to do. 

How did drawing save my life? My sanity in this culturally narrow and conservative place was being wacked right and left. I gave up all fine art and focused on design and illustration. For 10 years, I painted what I thought would sell. I survived physically, but emotionally and spiritually, I was a wreck. A series of things helped put me right, not the least of which is a Thursday night drawing group. Drawing from life is a difficult thing. Focusing on one thing and recreating it with a little pencil is a wonderful thing. Spending $5 for the privilege is a delightful thing. An evening in my drawing friends' company is priceless. Thank you to everyone who helped save my life.

4 comments:

  1. Great art painting.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Nice portraits. (Love the adonis too). Well in art I guess you have to create what you love to creat, and not only think about the selling-aspect of it all. In the end it will only kill your joy of creating. But I guess that it isn´t that easy when you need to make a living out of the art.

    ReplyDelete
  3. So true Catharina. I've gone both ways, and neither worked out very well. It is a conundrum faced by so many artists, including musicians and actors.

    ReplyDelete