Patience

There is a hydrangea that grows out of a lush corner where our brick patio wall meets the much older brick at the front edge of our house. It is densely foliated with big, meaty, furling leaves, and laced with other minor shrubs and flowering weeds and little vines competing for light and water. Its vigor and robust aliveness is almost violently beautiful. The scene is complex, with many layers of leafy shapes and stem fragments overlapping and colliding and projecting into little eccentric pockets of space, reflecting or absorbing color in their veins and folds. Hard enough to make sense out of just looking at it, but our eyes and brains are incredibly fast at deciphering visual information, so the effort quickly brings pleasure to anyone who takes a moment to look and see. Drawing, or trying to draw it, though, is another thing entirely. A constant stream of decisions about what to render carefully and what to edit out to allow a coherent image to grow on a sheet of paper, what combination of pressure on the pencil, synchronized eye and hand movement, angle of a lead that might be sharp or dull and rounded - you couldn't do it if you tried to keep track of all of these processes. You would, as I often do, resort to scribbling, breaking leads, and sometimes saying BAD WORDS out loud. And of course, an objectively critical eye is needed to guide the progress of a drawing, but it doesn't usually stay objective. It gets judgmental, and wants to suck away motivation to keep going, because you know you're really never going to be as good as all the real artists out there, much less the great ones whose work leaves you in awe. But that's a little deep for a pleasant Saturday morning, and my girls are patiently waiting for me to make oatmeal pancakes for breakfast, so I'll let this tortured train of thought go for now and just post this morning's sketch.

hydrangea, dogwood, and tangle at the patio corner, 8 1/4 x 11 9/16, 9B graphite and watercolor pencils

 detail