I’m trying to relax into the tail end of Sunday with Jess, but there’s a moody feeling of unreasoned discontent that’s sticking with me. Words from this past week are popping back up as a reminder to be mindful of what’s being felt, “state before story”… My body can simply feel without reason attached to the feeling. Still… it’s much too easy to daydream up reasons for my unease.
Pushing that aside, we had our last scheduled drawing session for 2019, and there was some satisfaction in looking at the finished work laying on the floor. I don’t know that I was expecting to walk away from a year’s worth of figure drawing with anything in particular. I was mostly just signing up for the experience of showing up to see what happened.
What I got was a whole new world that opened up. Form, line, value, color, and unexpected things like philosophy and insight into other artists reasonings for why they do what they do. It’s been a delightful rediscovery of what it meant to be an artist rather than a craftsman. So after a year, this is where I’ve landed. It’s frustratingly close to a sense of basic competency that will allow me to move onto more complicated projects. I’d wait for it to get better, but then I’d never move on. Maybe that’s the source of my discontent, I want to feel proud of where it’s landed, but see where it falls short and now I need to wait until next time (weeks) to make another go of it…
Zygote Blum 