Opportunity for observation...

Going about one's daily business provides many opprtunities for looking and seeing. Every situation encountered yields possible images. While the camera is a useful tool to record a situation it does not allow for immediacy, for the recording of an observed scenario, and the photos often disappoint expectations. What is it about the situation directly witnessed that makes for compelling note-taking?

A friend had taken me along to a local nursery to help her choose shrub plantings for a section of her back yard. She was the one to do the hard thinking and decision-making, leaving me alone to look about, to case out the views in the nursery. The woman in this sketch made a good model. She stood in place for 5 minutes, casting about for companion plants for those she had already selectd to buy, and which she had placed on the rolling nursery cart. I made goood use of the 5 minutes and jotted down this observation. What to include, what to leave out? I had to make the decision and go for broke. This is the drawing that resulted.

Later as my friend walked about the nursery making her selection, this placement of specimes caught my eye. I stopped and drew for another 5 minutes.

Opportunity for drawing from observation exists at every part of the waking day. The practice of drawing in this manner allows for relaxation, for no end agenda in mind. The process of looking and seeing is the end in itself. A good way to learn to draw, to appreciate the riches and bounty available to all.

Who knows how further work in the studio may make use of such observed facts. Poets use words, with all their meaning combined to yield communication about thoughts and feelings ocurring to them. Visual artists stock-in-trade is image, the making of a mark. a visual artist needs to keep a vocabulary, constantly add to it, a visual vocabulary. Then making compositions with meaning becomes a definite possibility.. Looking becomes seeing becomes feeling becomes thinking.