If you want to get out of your rut, I recommend doing something really dramatic with your hair (other options are more expensive and potentially ruinious). It’s fast, painless, and if it’s REALLY dramatic, people start conversations with you and smile a lot more. I like that sort of blowback from a haircut. Got it yesterday.
Before
For all the people who have been breathlessly anticipating this, and who cast votes for my new look, today is the day I get the makeover. I found a competent hairguy who will ruthlessly cut off my crowning glory (alternately known as a bird nest or a brillo pad) and dye blond what’s left. Well, not really blond. Caramel is what I’m hoping for, anything but black and gray. Right now I look like I’m wearing an angry skunk.
More later.
To draw something is to own it. You take home a sheet of paper with an image filtered through you, and you have an intense experience of the subject that can’t be taken away. I once sat for hours at the South Rim of the Grand Canyon with a sketchbook and made exactly two drawings. What I learned from that observation was that the canyon is a set of horizontal shapes stacked one above the other and fantastically carved by wind and water. A laminated land form. That experience was more than twenty years ago but I still can see it vividly, a side effect of looking long and carefully and transmitting that image from my eyes to my hands. Could there be there some neurological change from this sort of concentration and interpretation? I wonder.
One reason to draw a real live bird, to spend so much time with your subject, a pencil and pad, and your very own hand-eye coordination, is that when you have a drawing, the esssence of that bird is yours to keep. You have absorbed it’s every motion, nuance, feather tract and life-force and it becomes a member of the academy of brain cells and nerve fibers. If, someday, you see that species again, you have the reserves to work from, the muscle memory, and the proportions are stored where you can retrieve them again.
This kind of observation of living, moving birds gives you the same intimacy, mixed in with adrenalin and a frantic attention and sense of urgency. These are some images drawn on recent trips to Cairns, Australia and Barro Colorado Island, Panama. The Grand Canyon changes very little while you draw it, you can be sure of that. Birds live fast. They don’t hold still, at least you can’t count on them to hold a pose. How does one catch their image on the fly? More tomorrow…
