the eye of the artist 2

That thing about where the eyes are in the head was a revelation for me. I still have the painting and I remember the day. Afterwards I signed up for a drawing class based on that Right Side of the Brain book. Interspersed within are these little examples of how a person drew before they got into the book and how they drew a few months later, and the differences are just amazing. I thought it was a bit of hype, but a few months later I was way better.

Another thing is perspective, how lines go to a vanishing point. I remember as a kid when I would draw sidewalks, because sidewalks are important in a kid’s life, and I would always have this dilemma where I knew that the cracks in the sidewalk were parallel, and yet when I looked at them they were converging toward the center, and I have to admit it, I didn’t quite believe what I was seeing because I knew that those lines were parallel.

One day when I was subbing, in the sixth grade I think, we were doing some kind of art, I saw one of the kids, and you could tell he was one of the better artists in the class, it seems like all classes had one or two artists that their classmates considered a really good drawer, but he was putting in his sidewalk cracks with those parallel lines. Ah, at last a chance to actually teach something. I explained it to him, I took him over to the window and showed him the sidewalk outside. He thought about it for a while, and then he went back to drawing in the cracks as parallel lines.

The other thing about the way the artist sees things is that once you get into the habit of looking at things you can analyze them, you are never bored. If you are sitting in the doctor’s office you begin to notice what kind of ceiling the room has, what kind of molding, how the corners intersect, what about those windows, single pane, many panes, what kind of curtains? And then you even get to thinking about how you would paint it, how you would start the painting, what you would leave out, what you would move around, like maybe the receptionist desk would look better over there on the other side of the room.

That knife thing, it is just like a three inch pocket knife, and there is no way it got dull the little that I use it (I was cutting cellophane off a candy cane when it happened) I doubt it has had a chance to become dull.

I do remember that bit about sharpening a knife though from when I was a Boy Scout. I was in the boy scouts for four or five years, never got past tenderfoot, never really wanted to. I liked the hanging out and goofing off, but the rest of it didn’t appeal to me at all. Sleeping in a pup tent in the middle of the winter, ugh. When that wind of the wild that called to you came breezing into my room, I shut the window.