Art lessons

The other night in art class my teacher said to us,

"you have to draw a little bit of everything before you can draw a lot of anything".

He was talking about graphite and paper of course.  He meant you have to pay attention to placement or else your final product, the drawing, will be a mash-up of ill proportioned figures.  He meant you should carefully mark up areas ahead of time, plan your composition.  Don't take your still life assignments one vase at a time.

I, however, started thinking about this simple statement since it made so much sense to me in terms of drawing.  It also made sense in terms of life.  Usually if I'm feeling a little blue or overwhelmed I can trace it back to this tendency to focus on what's immediately in front of me while somehow ignoring every other thing in the world.  If I tried to draw a basket of fruit without observing it's relationship to surrounding objects, it would likely end up much too large, taking up too much space.  I think this can also be summed up by saying "keep the big picture in mind", don't lose sight of the desired result, and wait to make any permanent marks until you're sure they're in the right place.

xo

-C