May 6, 2006
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I received interesting feedback from a friend on my last blog. I was visting a coffee shop and started talking with someone about art. After a while, she started talking about this "great local artist" that I later realized was me. "Great"? Me??? In a split second, I remembered my creedo: One person's dream is another person's nightmare. I can't remember who said it or where I heard it (I was too young), but it's the one thing that I've never begun to doubt. So some can think I'm a "great artist", while others think I stink. So, it's not unfeasible that I should run across someone who genuinely thinks my art is great, while it's inevitable that someone will come up to me and tell me exactly the opposite. In other words, while most guys can't stand to look away from Cindy Crawford, there are still those (including me) who can't stand to look at her. Anyway, she told me that what I said about realizing what you're doing wrong being the key to practice was what she missed. She had never caught it. So, she would be going back and practicing the things she was doing wrong. When I asked her what she had been having a problem with, she told me she was a medical student who could not get an injection right. She had continued doing the same thing again and again, never admitting she had it wrong to begin with. My friend, you're welcome. Now, I've been having trouble with a graphite piece I'm working on. The problem is not in the design, the time required for the size of the drawing, or even the details, but the fact that I made a huge blunder. I put a border around the edge of my drawings because different people have different ideas about what kind of frame should be used. Some like metal, some like wood, some like plastic. Some like color for black and white pieces, some like natural wood for everything. But everybody likes what appeals most to their own sense of art. So, I'm working with the border. The piece is 16x20 and is about 70% black. That means much of the black area will be along the border, which is intended to be white. Imagine my horror when I took a step back and realized my shading was in the border! Even more, it was too dark to be erased completely. No problem--or is there a problem? I could easily use erasing to create an odd grey border, but that would work with more white along the border. There is almost no white on the edge, and some gray as well. So, I'm going to finish the drawing, then try the gray border. If it works, yay! If not, I'll need to figure something out. There's a difference between correcting mistakes and covering them up. Correcting means you are able to go back to how it was before; covering up means you do something else to hide it. Trust me, there's a bunch of covering up in art, and I don't like it at all. I'd rather start over again from scratch, but this piece is too bothersome to start over again. Besides, it's more time consuming, and if you rely on your art to survive you'll have to cover up most of the time. Next week, I'll be scanning a bunch of drawings I've done during the past few months. I'll also be talking more about some of the works I'll be putting up on this site. And maybe--maybe--I'll put up the "Hitler O'Keefe" drawing, further explaining the reason why it has that name and the mistake I made.
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