I haven’t painted in months. I’ve had paintings living in my head but no ambition to let them escape on to the canvas. I don’t know what is wrong with me. Perhaps it is all the major changes that I’ve been involved in the last year career-wise that have left me creatively frozen. My moods have been down, my heart torn between challenges, and the art is just stuck inside behind a clogged creative artery.
In the meantime I’ve been trying to sketch as much as time allows between design jobs and training for a new career. Nothing terribly exciting or imaginative has come from any of it, but sometimes just the act of drawing can loosen the mental knots. I have always been very fond of classic Science illustration, having found an amazing natural history book in my grandmother’s house as a child with wonderful illustrations. I found the delicate line detail of the drawings so beautiful. I remember trying to copy them. My renderings were clumsy approximations at best, but I found quiet comfort in the process. So when my creativity is dragging this is the type of work I find myself drawn to.
I’ve been studying photographs of insects, reptiles and sea life, slowly transforming what I see into line drawings. There is a moment of zen I reach in the process as I discover the beauty of each creature that I try to explain through each intricate articulation and organization of lines. Lines are the ultimate indicators of personal artistic style, and like a signature or a thumbprint, they define each of my drawings (no matter how mundane the subject matter) as uniquely mine…hence the entire process becomes an exercise in self reflection.
