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Part 7 Drawing and meditation

Part 7 Drawing and meditation

Drawing and meditation - Part 7


This is a simple yet difficult thing to explain.
Drawing from a 'thing' tunes your skills, it reassures you because you see an image of the 'thing' appear like a magical illusion on your sheet of paper. You will also extend and enrich your vocabulary particularly if your develop images from your mind or multi image compositions.

If you can work like this as well as work in a free way from your mind and by watching the lines grow on the paper that is great, but it is rare to be able to do both.

Drawing from life is essentially a slow process particularly if you are trying to accurately record detail while keeping the whole image together.
As you are forming and growing in your awareness, working from life can also hold up your development if you can't shake off the images you have learned.

It takes courage to simply put line down on a piece of paper without an object in front of you, but try to overcome your fear. Just play as if you are on the telephone, whittling a stick, combing your hair. Relax and imagine that the paper in front of you is a space of any dimension you like, vast, body-size, small, minute. Think about the endless range of possibilities those thoughts alone can bring!

Start in different parts of the paper, now take your line for a walk; rounded shapes, squarish shapes, divisions, segments, swirls, arcs,
zigzags, waves, spirals, spheres, cubes, sharp points, soft forms, solids, liquids, static, moving and many, many more possibilities.

Do several drawings, and don't work too big at this stage because you want to be able to make several drawings or be able to complete a drawing at on sitting. Lots of unfinished large drawings restrict your flow.

When you feel ready, continue to draw a variety of shapes and in addition, play around with putting them together in different ways, really have fun. Even without realizing it, you are developing a visual vocabulary while building up a bank of images which you will be able to look through later to plot your journey.

Let us imagine that some of your shapes start to look like heads.
This next idea will show you just how liberated you are!
Let the shapes become heads but not real life heads that you might imitate, but heads that only live in this exciting new reality on your paper.

You can build up a whole sequence of heads, constantly experimenting with the shapes inside and outside the form. You have now entered the endless world of your imagination and you must let it flow (put other things and worries out of your mind). You could try meditating before you start and/or looking into the distance, then sit in a relaxed position and close your eyes, let your whole body go into a relaxed state.

If you are drawing heads, watch your line being drawn as if they are being made by an outside energy (this may well be true or course).
Let things happen, there is no such thing as a mistake, only change, control will develop automatically, draw what you are comfortable with and in a way that is comfortable to you.

Just to give you an idea about ways to change your approach by using your imagination. Imagine that the head is made of different materials.
Imagine the head is like a landscape, a plant, an animal, a fish, passive, angry, masculine, feminine (gender qualities that are interchangeable).

That exercise will open up such potential and be an incredible insight into your reactions to life in so many ways. I will leave you to try it!
This is it, we have really begun - together, and I will be with you every step of the way. Post your drawings on Art and Creativity and please, please, don't be shy, what ever the result, lets get this going!

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