do not laugh at me but i actually thought YOU DREW hte apple at the top of the email. like you'd improved at it, and this is what you came up with. only after i read the whole thing did i look back and see it was PICASSO. i know that is beside your whole point burt HAHAHA.
That's so funny. Imagine if the point of the whole thing was, "Just keep diligently working at anything you're bad at and don't enjoy and don't feel is that important to your life, because eventually you will transform into PICASSO!" Actually sometimes I feel like that's often the undercurrent of educational culture? The more you suffer, the more valuable you will become! I definitely buy it a lot of the time.
I'm a professional artist with an art degree and I HATE having people tell me how to draw. Every time I take a class, it's a battle. I'm always like...ok, that's how YOU draw, but what does it have to do with me?
I've managed to pick up a few tricks from teachers here and there over the years, but most of my career has been choosing to be bad at art my own way rather than be good at art someone else's way.
Polly, I think the people who are commenting saying "you could be good at drawing with a different learning approach" are technically correct, but also wrong about something important. If someone truly desires to draw, and if drawing was their true medium, they would already be drawing. Nothing could even STOP them from drawing. It's like you with writing. Somehow it always happens, in some form. Obviously there are some people who pick up sketching as an enjoyable/meaningful hobby later in life, but there's always something a bit contained about that kind of art which doesn't appeal to me. I love the art that is so desperate to come out, it's happy to be wrong while it does it.
I do draw but I had no idea how much I prefer pens and sketching and cartoons to sitting and trying to draw one object well. On the plus side, I do think I'm seeing highlights and shapes more clearly suddenly, and that's at least interesting if not all that useful to me at the moment.
I think sometimes I just like having experiences that scramble my pre-existing ideas and perceptions of the world -- even when they're unpleasant or tedious.
But I'm with you on not wanting to do things someone else's way. I can really get derailed with writing or with pottery when I decide someone else holds the one key to the whole kingdom. I've done well with blundering in and making mistakes so that's my METHOD!
Also it's true that sometimes to get into that blunder-space you need someone else to give you bad advice. ;-)
I'm friends with a lot of middle-aged visual artists and I'm starting to believe that art classes exist for two reasons. First, as a social mechanism to help artists get paid for being artists. Secondly, because the vast majority of humans can only get out of their comfort zone if they are in a room with other people doing the same thing. Neither of those reasons involve someone being a competent teacher!
. I went to an art college for a bit and the drawing teacher there would complain that I 'drew like a child'; the digital arts teacher there saw my sketches and told me my style was 'graphic and bold, perfect for design or animation'. So... different 'experts' have different eyes on these things.
. In terms of being bad at something but enjoying it - I took up skateboarding at the age of 36. Went to weekly group classes. It took me about 3 times as long to pick things up as the others, but I relished the challenge of learning something new, moving my body in a new way, and when I finally did get a trick or be able to drop in to a higher ramp, it felt like such an achievement. I skated for about 4 years, then fizzled off it due to a bad back injury (and got into dance, which I love). But the community, girls skate events, little day trips we took to other skate parks... all cherished memories, totally worth it, no matter how mediocre or slow my skating was💗
That's so brave! I like the idea of doing a thing for a while without mastering it, just to have great memories of a vivid time. I have this bad habit of treating fond memories like something that's lost and not a form of treasure -- in direct contradiction to the way we are taught to treat memories in mainstream American culture! So I'm working on that now: looking for ways to MAKE memories and TREASURE them instead of treating everything like it's a) worth the considerable effort b) not worth it or c) maybe so pleasing that you'll only be sad when you aren't doing it anymore!!! My greedy banker take on memories and experiences has got to go!
Pollyyyyy!!!! I need to write this comment because you’ve been so helpful about pushing through writing blocks etc, and how you feel about writing is how I feel about drawing.
You CAN NOT be bad at drawing. It’s just not possible!
What I hear, as an ~illustrator and ~artist with a certified degree in "drawing", who just woke up to my 7th rejection this year to a residency— which once again had a "record breaking" "high number of talented applicants"— and arrived a couple minutes before you published this newsletter, is that your drawings simply don’t look the way you want them to. But they are defo not bad. Because drawings can not be bad.
I don't think art of any medium can be bad, unless it was made by AI. And this is the result of learning how to draw and then learning how boring that is and wishing I could make more abstract pieces but being chained to the algorithm of representational art and very technically skilled abstract artists and not being able to fuck around nor find out without feeling like a FAILURE.
The biggest challenge to visual art is being able to stomach that a drawing or painting didn't come out the way you wanted it to. It's different than writing and music, which you can delete from the world by not playing it anymore, or removing a file from your computer. But it IS sexy! Think about all the sexy fucked up visual artists toiling away in their studios and getting scurvy and dying or going insane from the heavy metals in their supplies and... you know what I mean!!!
Your teacher, however, sounds very bad at explaining how she draws an apple. Which is troubling only if you want to draw an apple exactly like your teacher.
When I learned how to draw, which wasn't until in my 20s, I had an extremely hot extraordinarily talented illustrator instructor that I paid a LOT of money to in the form of an illustration degree— that I dropped out of!!! Who was the perfect level of inspiring, criticizing and healthy shame to encouragement. He taught “Observational drawing”, something which he emphasized was simply a skill where you train your brain and hand to copy the world around you.
We did a lot of still life drawing and he was very good at explaining how your eye and hand can sync up and you can create a decent rendering of any apple in the world.
We also took color theory classes and material classes and many other classes where rendering reality was not the key to a passing grade, and you could see in those classes where there were draftsmanship and where it was lacking, but the technically skilled at rendering any apple in the world artists were not always the most successful pieces on crit day! Far from it!
In your case, I know that you love abstract art. Visual Artists were FREED from the torment of having to recreate a scene as depicted in the real world from the invention of the camera, and now all your drawings of apples can be weird and messy and not look anything like your lazy teacher's (who, if she's an illustrator, probably has a whole maze of crazy internalized bullshit about art and drawing that she works through all the time) and have it still be a good drawing of an apple.
That's why I would highly recommend “The Syllabus” or “What It Is” by Lynda Barry. The Syllabus is her hand drawn syllabus for her drawing classes for non-artists at a university level to encourage creativity in general. She's incredible and it's the only place I recommend people start if they want to learn how to draw.
I guarantee you though if you keep practicing and learning drawing though you'll wish you had these weird apples from this shitty class.
I took a class in community college where we used charcoal sticks to draw naked people on butcher paper every Wednesday (one model wore a c**k ring when he modeled, so talk about an exciting class lol)
The process of drawing is also about experimentation…I imagine a class breaking down the fundamentals of writing might also put someone to sleep. Sitting down and starting to scribble is also a good place to start IMO. I recommend the book Syllabus by Lynda Barry!!
Gah. I was a Waldorf teacher and I was always terrible at drawing, painting etc. Its still rough for me to recall how baaaadd I was at that "remove your imagination" part bc I'm still so pissed that a pedagogy which is based on effin imagination ( + other woo woo stuff that I like) made me draw ALL THE DAMN TIME. Were also Waldorf parents and I once called my easy-going, good-at-perspective-changes-and-experiened-shader husband "Shady McShaderson" in a loud grumpy voice during drawing at Parents Night. He laughed but the teacher did not. I'm still really bad at drawing & shading makes me mad. So now I will go write in my stupid journal where I DO like my handwriting!
I can imagine the prim and self-satisfied husband fussily shading at the parents' night, with the growling, frustrated wife beside him. VIVID. AND I GET IT!
I remember watching my boyfriend (now husband) grinding out learning how to draw 10 years ago and thinking how absolutely insane the effort was. Now he's pretty good, and has since begun painting as well. We've been traveling, and watching him do these fun little sketches/watercolors of places we go was SO intoxicating to me. Suddenly this winter (would you believe, perfectly aligned with stalling-out on a first draft and feeling ambivalent about something else I was "done" with), it felt like painting and drawing was the most important thing in the world, words were insufficient!!! WHAT COULD BE BETTER than sketching!
My husband was so enthusiastic! Get a sketchbook! It will be great! So I tried sketching some small version of photos of landscapes I had taken. That was actually pretty fun. But the instant I tried to make it larger than a thumbnail, more than an impression, to actually draw something of any complexity? Yeah. My husband has totally forgotten how hard it is and underestimates how much work he has put in. (And I did too, even though I was there, watching the whole process.)
I may still keep my little thumbnail-landscapes practice. But I think I have to return to my words. :)
Yeah, it's easy to believe that your own format or genre is limiting until you try a new one! And there are times when you have the patience to learn something slowly, acquiring skills without noticing, and other times when it's just so taxing and impossible and not at all what you want to do. I watched tons of people quit pottery after failing to center the clay for months. I just kept failing for a whole year and then finally realized I had never centered properly and it was limiting my progress. I think if I had known how wrong I was getting it all I might've quit, but I was blissfully ignorant, and in some ways I picked up a lot of extra skills from having to do battle with wiggly and bobbling pots for so long.
The last oil painting class I took, the teacher insisted on teaching us to draw. He (Richard Kirk) broke it down into very understandable steps that included using a ruler and a graphing method. Drawing is not as satisfying or interesting as slapping oil paint onto a canvas, but I did learn quite a bit.
Last year for our anniversary, my husband bought a bass and I bought a ukulele. I had grand dreams of us quitting our day jobs and going on tour. He has been teaching himself using an online program and has gotten pretty damn good. I took live classes and hated almost every second. I could plink and pick at the strings, but chords?! It’s like my eyes forgot to read and my brain and hands never got on the same page. I hated it.
Tour dreams dashed… but at least he had picked up some good finger tricks, so I guess I’m still winning 😉
I am taking a ceramics class and I’m so bad at it! One of my bowls exploded in the kiln. Most people in my class have experience or make careful & considered creations while I’m over here going ham. I took a HUGE chunk of clay to the wheel last week & my instructor was like: way to go for it! Letting myself be so awful at something is liberating. I like the feeling of excitement superseding shame.
Yeah, I think wrestling huge lumps of clay is underrated! As is making very very small things that are easy for you, just to feel what it's like to do things without struggling. Switching things up with clay is great, and sets you up to get used to making mistakes/ failing in public, which, if you don't own a wheel, is an important skill in itself.
Also, when you try to make new things often, you sometimes get good at some weird thing (closed forms, handles, plates) that a lot of other people tend to avoid because they got so good at something else that they never want to go back and suffer after that.
Your very last sentence is ringing like a bell, not for creative pursuits, but for a situation at work. I was hired to build a new program at my organization and 2 years in leadership is still waffling about the direction they want to take. I feel blocked and dismissed and often confused. Reading and resonating with your words here, I’m realizing how much of my frustration is based on what I imagined not matching up with reality. Time to see the situation and accept it for what it is.
I found out by taking classes that painting and drawing are two very different disciplines. As a painter, drawing may help if you want to paint something and make it 3-D, I.e., realistically. I always said I couldn’t draw, and when I took a drawing class, I found it was mostly true, but that with practice, I improved, which I think is true of most things. But what I also learned was that drawing is about seeing, and then using your hand to describe what you see, and that’s indeed where the math skill can be useful for angles and such. You had to stop seeing things in 3-D, because your brain wants to copy that. If you flatten what you’re looking at, you start to see the angles, as you described. Then there are tricks you learn—foreshortening, which my instructor explained is rotating something on its axis. I had no idea what he meant until I stopped trying to make something look like what my brain thinks a knee, for example, looks like in front of a thigh. If you’re looking straight at a model with their leg bent towards you, You can’t draw the thigh, in other words, you can only indicate it with angles meeting at the knee. That’s all fine, but what I wanted to say is take a painting class instead! PLAY with paint. Don’t buy expensive ones right away, but just mix colors and see what happens. I taught painting (I have an MFA in it, and still struggle with drawing) and what I’d tell the students was, first you have to figure out what kind of marks your hands makes. YOUR hand, not Van Gogh’s or Picasso’s. YOURS? Your next task is to learn to like what you can do, and only you can do. Don’t judge it by what it’s not, but by what it is. Better yet, don’t judge it at all. Enjoy the process. You’re either a process person or a product person. I like the process. You can always paint over the product! Have fun, Polly. I love your column, been reading it for years.
I have been wrestling with a series of feelings this year that I think you have distilled into the sentence "Maybe it’s time to [do] less and enjoy it more." Thank you for putting this into such concise, true words for me!
Yoga is my version of this, I’m genuinely terrible at it and I keep doing it anyways because nothing makes me feel better or calmer. Writing is the opposite for me. I loved it as a kid and then somewhere along the way I got told it wasn’t practical, and I lost it for years. A fog lifted recently after a long grief and I’ve felt compelled to write again, like something came back that I didn’t realize I’d lost. Coming back to art with my kids has done the same thing, I used to love drawing and it turns out I still do. I think a lot of us quietly abandoned the things we loved most because someone told us we weren’t good enough or it wasn’t serious enough. And then one day something shifts and you find your way back, usually through a side door you weren’t expecting. I hope to keep discovering new hobbies I love and coming back to old ones I let go.
I love this: "You have to let go of what you imagined, and work with reality instead." It reminds me of a line I often quote as a coach, from Ayodeji Awosika: “The biggest obstacle to clarity is focusing on the way things should work as opposed to how they do work.” True in drawing, true in life. (Oh and I totally thought that you drew the apple pictured here too; had a good laugh at the comments...)
do not laugh at me but i actually thought YOU DREW hte apple at the top of the email. like you'd improved at it, and this is what you came up with. only after i read the whole thing did i look back and see it was PICASSO. i know that is beside your whole point burt HAHAHA.
That's so funny. Imagine if the point of the whole thing was, "Just keep diligently working at anything you're bad at and don't enjoy and don't feel is that important to your life, because eventually you will transform into PICASSO!" Actually sometimes I feel like that's often the undercurrent of educational culture? The more you suffer, the more valuable you will become! I definitely buy it a lot of the time.
Thanks for imagining me as very talented!
Me too! Except I was like “idk she’s pretty good drawing actually, that’s a perfectly fine apple even if the shading is a little uneven.”
I'm a professional artist with an art degree and I HATE having people tell me how to draw. Every time I take a class, it's a battle. I'm always like...ok, that's how YOU draw, but what does it have to do with me?
I've managed to pick up a few tricks from teachers here and there over the years, but most of my career has been choosing to be bad at art my own way rather than be good at art someone else's way.
Polly, I think the people who are commenting saying "you could be good at drawing with a different learning approach" are technically correct, but also wrong about something important. If someone truly desires to draw, and if drawing was their true medium, they would already be drawing. Nothing could even STOP them from drawing. It's like you with writing. Somehow it always happens, in some form. Obviously there are some people who pick up sketching as an enjoyable/meaningful hobby later in life, but there's always something a bit contained about that kind of art which doesn't appeal to me. I love the art that is so desperate to come out, it's happy to be wrong while it does it.
I do draw but I had no idea how much I prefer pens and sketching and cartoons to sitting and trying to draw one object well. On the plus side, I do think I'm seeing highlights and shapes more clearly suddenly, and that's at least interesting if not all that useful to me at the moment.
I think sometimes I just like having experiences that scramble my pre-existing ideas and perceptions of the world -- even when they're unpleasant or tedious.
But I'm with you on not wanting to do things someone else's way. I can really get derailed with writing or with pottery when I decide someone else holds the one key to the whole kingdom. I've done well with blundering in and making mistakes so that's my METHOD!
Honestly that is the best method.
Also it's true that sometimes to get into that blunder-space you need someone else to give you bad advice. ;-)
I'm friends with a lot of middle-aged visual artists and I'm starting to believe that art classes exist for two reasons. First, as a social mechanism to help artists get paid for being artists. Secondly, because the vast majority of humans can only get out of their comfort zone if they are in a room with other people doing the same thing. Neither of those reasons involve someone being a competent teacher!
2 things -
. I went to an art college for a bit and the drawing teacher there would complain that I 'drew like a child'; the digital arts teacher there saw my sketches and told me my style was 'graphic and bold, perfect for design or animation'. So... different 'experts' have different eyes on these things.
. In terms of being bad at something but enjoying it - I took up skateboarding at the age of 36. Went to weekly group classes. It took me about 3 times as long to pick things up as the others, but I relished the challenge of learning something new, moving my body in a new way, and when I finally did get a trick or be able to drop in to a higher ramp, it felt like such an achievement. I skated for about 4 years, then fizzled off it due to a bad back injury (and got into dance, which I love). But the community, girls skate events, little day trips we took to other skate parks... all cherished memories, totally worth it, no matter how mediocre or slow my skating was💗
That's so brave! I like the idea of doing a thing for a while without mastering it, just to have great memories of a vivid time. I have this bad habit of treating fond memories like something that's lost and not a form of treasure -- in direct contradiction to the way we are taught to treat memories in mainstream American culture! So I'm working on that now: looking for ways to MAKE memories and TREASURE them instead of treating everything like it's a) worth the considerable effort b) not worth it or c) maybe so pleasing that you'll only be sad when you aren't doing it anymore!!! My greedy banker take on memories and experiences has got to go!
Pollyyyyy!!!! I need to write this comment because you’ve been so helpful about pushing through writing blocks etc, and how you feel about writing is how I feel about drawing.
You CAN NOT be bad at drawing. It’s just not possible!
What I hear, as an ~illustrator and ~artist with a certified degree in "drawing", who just woke up to my 7th rejection this year to a residency— which once again had a "record breaking" "high number of talented applicants"— and arrived a couple minutes before you published this newsletter, is that your drawings simply don’t look the way you want them to. But they are defo not bad. Because drawings can not be bad.
I don't think art of any medium can be bad, unless it was made by AI. And this is the result of learning how to draw and then learning how boring that is and wishing I could make more abstract pieces but being chained to the algorithm of representational art and very technically skilled abstract artists and not being able to fuck around nor find out without feeling like a FAILURE.
The biggest challenge to visual art is being able to stomach that a drawing or painting didn't come out the way you wanted it to. It's different than writing and music, which you can delete from the world by not playing it anymore, or removing a file from your computer. But it IS sexy! Think about all the sexy fucked up visual artists toiling away in their studios and getting scurvy and dying or going insane from the heavy metals in their supplies and... you know what I mean!!!
Your teacher, however, sounds very bad at explaining how she draws an apple. Which is troubling only if you want to draw an apple exactly like your teacher.
When I learned how to draw, which wasn't until in my 20s, I had an extremely hot extraordinarily talented illustrator instructor that I paid a LOT of money to in the form of an illustration degree— that I dropped out of!!! Who was the perfect level of inspiring, criticizing and healthy shame to encouragement. He taught “Observational drawing”, something which he emphasized was simply a skill where you train your brain and hand to copy the world around you.
We did a lot of still life drawing and he was very good at explaining how your eye and hand can sync up and you can create a decent rendering of any apple in the world.
We also took color theory classes and material classes and many other classes where rendering reality was not the key to a passing grade, and you could see in those classes where there were draftsmanship and where it was lacking, but the technically skilled at rendering any apple in the world artists were not always the most successful pieces on crit day! Far from it!
In your case, I know that you love abstract art. Visual Artists were FREED from the torment of having to recreate a scene as depicted in the real world from the invention of the camera, and now all your drawings of apples can be weird and messy and not look anything like your lazy teacher's (who, if she's an illustrator, probably has a whole maze of crazy internalized bullshit about art and drawing that she works through all the time) and have it still be a good drawing of an apple.
That's why I would highly recommend “The Syllabus” or “What It Is” by Lynda Barry. The Syllabus is her hand drawn syllabus for her drawing classes for non-artists at a university level to encourage creativity in general. She's incredible and it's the only place I recommend people start if they want to learn how to draw.
I guarantee you though if you keep practicing and learning drawing though you'll wish you had these weird apples from this shitty class.
Hope this helps!!!! Keep drawing!!!!
Aw, thanks for all of this! This is very very helpful!
I love drawing but that sounds boring!!
I took a class in community college where we used charcoal sticks to draw naked people on butcher paper every Wednesday (one model wore a c**k ring when he modeled, so talk about an exciting class lol)
You deserve a fun drawing class!
The process of drawing is also about experimentation…I imagine a class breaking down the fundamentals of writing might also put someone to sleep. Sitting down and starting to scribble is also a good place to start IMO. I recommend the book Syllabus by Lynda Barry!!
Thanks for the recommendation! I love her.
Gah. I was a Waldorf teacher and I was always terrible at drawing, painting etc. Its still rough for me to recall how baaaadd I was at that "remove your imagination" part bc I'm still so pissed that a pedagogy which is based on effin imagination ( + other woo woo stuff that I like) made me draw ALL THE DAMN TIME. Were also Waldorf parents and I once called my easy-going, good-at-perspective-changes-and-experiened-shader husband "Shady McShaderson" in a loud grumpy voice during drawing at Parents Night. He laughed but the teacher did not. I'm still really bad at drawing & shading makes me mad. So now I will go write in my stupid journal where I DO like my handwriting!
I can imagine the prim and self-satisfied husband fussily shading at the parents' night, with the growling, frustrated wife beside him. VIVID. AND I GET IT!
I remember watching my boyfriend (now husband) grinding out learning how to draw 10 years ago and thinking how absolutely insane the effort was. Now he's pretty good, and has since begun painting as well. We've been traveling, and watching him do these fun little sketches/watercolors of places we go was SO intoxicating to me. Suddenly this winter (would you believe, perfectly aligned with stalling-out on a first draft and feeling ambivalent about something else I was "done" with), it felt like painting and drawing was the most important thing in the world, words were insufficient!!! WHAT COULD BE BETTER than sketching!
My husband was so enthusiastic! Get a sketchbook! It will be great! So I tried sketching some small version of photos of landscapes I had taken. That was actually pretty fun. But the instant I tried to make it larger than a thumbnail, more than an impression, to actually draw something of any complexity? Yeah. My husband has totally forgotten how hard it is and underestimates how much work he has put in. (And I did too, even though I was there, watching the whole process.)
I may still keep my little thumbnail-landscapes practice. But I think I have to return to my words. :)
Yeah, it's easy to believe that your own format or genre is limiting until you try a new one! And there are times when you have the patience to learn something slowly, acquiring skills without noticing, and other times when it's just so taxing and impossible and not at all what you want to do. I watched tons of people quit pottery after failing to center the clay for months. I just kept failing for a whole year and then finally realized I had never centered properly and it was limiting my progress. I think if I had known how wrong I was getting it all I might've quit, but I was blissfully ignorant, and in some ways I picked up a lot of extra skills from having to do battle with wiggly and bobbling pots for so long.
The last oil painting class I took, the teacher insisted on teaching us to draw. He (Richard Kirk) broke it down into very understandable steps that included using a ruler and a graphing method. Drawing is not as satisfying or interesting as slapping oil paint onto a canvas, but I did learn quite a bit.
Last year for our anniversary, my husband bought a bass and I bought a ukulele. I had grand dreams of us quitting our day jobs and going on tour. He has been teaching himself using an online program and has gotten pretty damn good. I took live classes and hated almost every second. I could plink and pick at the strings, but chords?! It’s like my eyes forgot to read and my brain and hands never got on the same page. I hated it.
Tour dreams dashed… but at least he had picked up some good finger tricks, so I guess I’m still winning 😉
I am taking a ceramics class and I’m so bad at it! One of my bowls exploded in the kiln. Most people in my class have experience or make careful & considered creations while I’m over here going ham. I took a HUGE chunk of clay to the wheel last week & my instructor was like: way to go for it! Letting myself be so awful at something is liberating. I like the feeling of excitement superseding shame.
Yeah, I think wrestling huge lumps of clay is underrated! As is making very very small things that are easy for you, just to feel what it's like to do things without struggling. Switching things up with clay is great, and sets you up to get used to making mistakes/ failing in public, which, if you don't own a wheel, is an important skill in itself.
Also, when you try to make new things often, you sometimes get good at some weird thing (closed forms, handles, plates) that a lot of other people tend to avoid because they got so good at something else that they never want to go back and suffer after that.
Your very last sentence is ringing like a bell, not for creative pursuits, but for a situation at work. I was hired to build a new program at my organization and 2 years in leadership is still waffling about the direction they want to take. I feel blocked and dismissed and often confused. Reading and resonating with your words here, I’m realizing how much of my frustration is based on what I imagined not matching up with reality. Time to see the situation and accept it for what it is.
I found out by taking classes that painting and drawing are two very different disciplines. As a painter, drawing may help if you want to paint something and make it 3-D, I.e., realistically. I always said I couldn’t draw, and when I took a drawing class, I found it was mostly true, but that with practice, I improved, which I think is true of most things. But what I also learned was that drawing is about seeing, and then using your hand to describe what you see, and that’s indeed where the math skill can be useful for angles and such. You had to stop seeing things in 3-D, because your brain wants to copy that. If you flatten what you’re looking at, you start to see the angles, as you described. Then there are tricks you learn—foreshortening, which my instructor explained is rotating something on its axis. I had no idea what he meant until I stopped trying to make something look like what my brain thinks a knee, for example, looks like in front of a thigh. If you’re looking straight at a model with their leg bent towards you, You can’t draw the thigh, in other words, you can only indicate it with angles meeting at the knee. That’s all fine, but what I wanted to say is take a painting class instead! PLAY with paint. Don’t buy expensive ones right away, but just mix colors and see what happens. I taught painting (I have an MFA in it, and still struggle with drawing) and what I’d tell the students was, first you have to figure out what kind of marks your hands makes. YOUR hand, not Van Gogh’s or Picasso’s. YOURS? Your next task is to learn to like what you can do, and only you can do. Don’t judge it by what it’s not, but by what it is. Better yet, don’t judge it at all. Enjoy the process. You’re either a process person or a product person. I like the process. You can always paint over the product! Have fun, Polly. I love your column, been reading it for years.
I have been wrestling with a series of feelings this year that I think you have distilled into the sentence "Maybe it’s time to [do] less and enjoy it more." Thank you for putting this into such concise, true words for me!
Yoga is my version of this, I’m genuinely terrible at it and I keep doing it anyways because nothing makes me feel better or calmer. Writing is the opposite for me. I loved it as a kid and then somewhere along the way I got told it wasn’t practical, and I lost it for years. A fog lifted recently after a long grief and I’ve felt compelled to write again, like something came back that I didn’t realize I’d lost. Coming back to art with my kids has done the same thing, I used to love drawing and it turns out I still do. I think a lot of us quietly abandoned the things we loved most because someone told us we weren’t good enough or it wasn’t serious enough. And then one day something shifts and you find your way back, usually through a side door you weren’t expecting. I hope to keep discovering new hobbies I love and coming back to old ones I let go.
This was such and impactful read. Thank you for the reminder to get out of my head and into reality!
I love this: "You have to let go of what you imagined, and work with reality instead." It reminds me of a line I often quote as a coach, from Ayodeji Awosika: “The biggest obstacle to clarity is focusing on the way things should work as opposed to how they do work.” True in drawing, true in life. (Oh and I totally thought that you drew the apple pictured here too; had a good laugh at the comments...)