This summer I’ve fallen in love with sketching Chantal’s flowers. Why? Cuz they’re beautiful, plentiful, and available. But another reason is that they really help me hone the connection between my visual and motor cortex. Some call this hand-eye coordination but there are no hands or eyes being trained here. It’s all hind brain doing the work and the trick is to get this to happen without interference from the forebrain, be it left or right forebrain. When artists say “get the brain out of the way,” this is what they mean whether they realize it or not.
Anyway, I spent a bunch of time “in the zone” drawing these black-eyed susans, locating them relative to one another. During most of it I was “unavailable” to anyone walking by. In the end I was both exhausted and exhilarated. I think I got most of it right. The leaves are not accurate. I used lines representing some leaves to locate the flowers but otherwise the leaves were a by guess and by golly venture. Hope you like it.
I love it and it was a favorite flower of mine to loosely sketch once on a regular basis. I dont know what has happened to me but i no longer have fun with my pen or pencil . Its very upsetting to me .
I have many in my yard too and I just love them. Very interesting Larry!
Hi Lynne,
Before the pandemic I couldn’t understand how someone could lose their passion/habit for doing art. Now I do, though I can’t explain it. All the lockdown, evaluation of what is/isn’t important and the rest caused me to lose my daily habit. And what I’ve found is that it takes a concious, almost forced re-entry into doing sketching. The upside is that once restarted, it’s easy to maintain it. Hope you find your way back.
Just beautiful.
Thanks, Diane. Drawing it was a lot of fun.
Lovely! And I, too, savor that feeling of being in the zone, which doesn’t happen regularly, but often enough to motivate me to try to get in it.
I read somewhere, though I can’t recall where, that the best artists can quickly get in/out of subconcious drawing so they can pop up, think about something, and drop back into it. For me, I just go somewhere and have no idea what’s going on around me.