puzzled

my general aim here is to keep a steady pace and work my way through the
book. what i'll usually do is read up to the next drawing exercise, do
that and then stop for the day. with holidays, travel and other
projects i'm involved in, there'll almost certainly be large gaps. with
my obsessive behavior, it would be very* easy for me to force feed this
stuff 16 hours a day and be done with the book in three days. i think
it's better to breathe deeper and let things stew -- the learning will
probably be more solid.

but here's what i don't get ...

i did that self-portrait yesterday and it's really not that bad. i've
spent *decades* not drawing anything for exactly the same reason i've
spent decades not stepping on nails. it hurts. i don't like it. i'm
not good at it. and there doesn't seem a whole lot of point in
practicing.

so where in the hell did that drawing come from? the point of this text
is to be shocked WHEN YOU'RE FINISHED, not at the start.

here's some possible fodder for the drawing fire:

* i like modern art. i've seen a lot of it and can actually talk a
reasonable game around it. it's not directly related to the stuff i'm
doing here, but probably comes into play.

* my wife was a hardcore fan of classic art. enough that we had tomes
laying around the house dedicated to it. just like national geographic,
i never read any of that stuff, but i've looked at all the pictures.
and i've spent a considerable length of time in the great art musea of
the world -- if it's north of the equator and is famous for something in
it, i've been there. so maybe part of it is just osmosis.

* i've spent a LOT of time working with and on human interfaces. my
specialty tends to be flow of use but over the years i've become acutely
aware of shading and shadowing in the UI. (q: what's the light source
in a standard GUI -- say windows or mac? a: upper left hand corner.)
it's work i've always liked and have an eye for.

* i've taken drafting since i quit drawing, but that too was decades
ago.

* i've spent countless hours watching people draw. when they draw
something i always think "okay, that's a table and that's a leg. oh!
they just drew in that reflection/line/shadow/whatever that i would
never have drawn. it doesn't 'seem' right, but it 'looks' right."
this, by the way, would be a classic right brain vs. left brain moment
(to use an edwardsism).

i really hate false modesty in a person. i believe it's a low form of
both conceit and lying. consider that when i tell you that i really and
truly couldn't draw. i mean not really at all. laughably bad. kids
laughed at what i drew and i laughed right along with them to keep from
being embarrassed about it all.

I COULDN'T EVEN CENTER MY DRAWING ON A PAGE. i can't tell you how many
times i had to ask a teacher for another piece of paper because it was
off-center, too-small or whatever the hell. i have a stuffed whale that
i did out of construction paper in the 60's hanging at my mom's house.
flip it over and look, the original drawing was too small.

WHERE THE HELL DID MY ABILITY TO DO THAT COME FROM?

on pages 18-20 there are before and after drawings by an entire class of
adult students of ms. edwards. it's a class of 16 people and it's
telling because (if i take her at her implied word), no one was weeded
out for being overly lame.

now in that class, my drawing would sit in the solid middle of the
"before" world. i just find that almost unimaginable. because this is
a class of people who have CHOSEN to take a drawing class. meaning
they're either fearless, have way too much time on their hands or MOST
PROBABLY HAVE ARTISTIC TALENT ALREADY.

and i don't qualify. or at least i didn't think i did. but it turns
out i'm wrong. you know this whole deal isn't wholly removed from
having bad BO -- it's not comforting when there's something about yourself
you don't know (and others might).

i came into this hoping to find a secret backway to my inner van gough,
not to discover that the gate had been open and flapping in the breeze
for n number of years.

the good news is that my drawing is worse than ALL of the final efforts
by a considerable margin. so if i'm happy now, i should be
buzzy-ecstatic by the end.

it does make me cast my doubts about just how far forward i can go -- or
at least the joy associated with it. some of the class-success shock
has already been taken away by my self-discovery and i doubt i'll come
away drawing like miró.

i find myself simultaneously giddy and suspicious about all this. like
falling in love very hard with a girl. you think it's great, you know
how you feel. but you wonder how you got there and aren't certain that
it's actually real or if you're just making stuff up in your head.

i've never felt this way about anything that wasn't a person of the
opposite sex.

and that too is unsettling.

goddammit.