Available Light

I've made a start on the drawing. For a long time the pad and pencils sat on my desk, eyeing me accusingly. I wanted to do it, but it was one more thing to take up the precious hours in the day. One more ancient fear to face. It was a sort of deadlock, broken by the arrival of the text book that Audrey had recommended, Drawing On The Right Side Of The Brain . One of the first things to do, said the book, was to draw a few pictures as a reference point, to see how far you progress from this point onwards as you go on with the lessons. In the book were some examples of the self portraits people had done at the start of the five day courses tutored by the author, Betty Edwards, along with the ones they had done at the end. Such as these ones: I thought that if she could teach someone to make that sort of progress in 5 days, she was probably worth listening to. And so far, so good. I've done the before self portrait (the answer is NO) and a few other little bits and pieces, and lea...

I bought some stuff at the Warehouse Stationery the other day, which I have been meaning to buy for a while. About 40 years. I bought a block of drawing paper, some pencils and a rubber. When I was very small I drew a lot. I covered the backs and blank pages of exercise books and those little newsprint jotter pads with all the stuff little boys draw, which usually involved fighter planes with circles on them shooting down other fighter planes with crosses on them. It wasn't exactly the early Leonardo, but my teacher in Standard 4 told my mother that my future lay in art. Well it didn't, obviously. In fact with the encouragement of my art teacher,I gave up the drawing in High School, and haven't done any since, except for cartoon illustrations in letters to girls - which obviously worked because one of them married me. There's always been a niggling sense of loss though, in the place where paper and pencil used to be. In my twenties I even joined an art class but the ...