It’s hard to put into words how much I enjoy my life drawing sessions each week, and how much I gain from them. For four hours everything else melts away (except for the background music and minimal chatter) and it’s easy to get lost in the moment and to think solely in graphic terms. I count drawing as one of the most satisfying forms of meditation there is. That doesn’t mean to say there isn’t frustration involved, but the lessons learned make every line, however searching, well worth it.
06.11.18 ©2018 Elizabeth Fram, 18 x 24 inches, Graphite on paper
06.25.18 ©2018 Elizabeth Fram, 18 x 24 inches, Graphite and colored pencil on paper
07.09.18 ©2018 Elizabeth Fram, 18 x 24 inches, Graphite and charcoal on paper
These thoughts from Roy Eastland’s blog , ‘I Draw’, capture the magic beautifully:
They are drawings of people and that’s all they are. They are drawings done for drawing’s sake (drawing as a way of thinking about drawing). They are drawings of people who were still (or fairly still) for maybe ten or twenty minutes. They are drawings of people but drawings of people are never just hand-made pictures of people. Drawings trace moments in time. Hand-drawn lines take time and the moment of their making is subtly replayed each time someone spends time to notice them. There are heavy lines, sharp lines, long lines, feathery lines… the variety is endless and each of them implies the presence of a thought. We change our minds as we draw and our lines capture those moments of change. We look and we notice something and we try to track the gist of it on the paper. The time taken to draw even the shortest line is there to see in its entirety all at once (like seeing a tiny life-span played out on the page). We pay attention to the simple presence of things whenever we draw. The drawing is always wrong. We look again and we make another line. Each time it is wrong in a different way but sometimes the mark is good in spite of its wrongness. Sometimes the line feels true or it does something interesting (something we couldn’t have predicted but which is more interesting than anything we could have predicted). It’s enough that just a small part of a drawing is interesting for it to feel good. As we make our mark we are bringing into play all our momentary perceptions, all our skill and memories of all the other drawings we have ever seen. Eventually the time is up and the pose ends and all that remains of the moment, and of the protagonists, is the drawing. One day the drawing will be the only thing left of that moment. Perhaps we make ghosts when we draw.