No patience
Wednesday, September 7, 2011 at 8:24PM I don't know if it's that I waited until the end of the work day, having written two articles for a kitchen design blog, sitting in front of the computer for hours. Or if the strain of containing myself when I really wanted to yell at people wore me out. Or if the heavy downpour that shows no sign of letting up has gotten on my nerves, finding previously watertight ways to get into our house, softening plaster and drenching old woodwork around the stained glass windows in the studio, dripping onto the staircase where water has never leaked. Or if it's a deeper anxiety generated by feeling the sky close and relentlessly dark and the streets running like broad sluices and the creeks flowing muddy across the roads and the Susquehanna swollen and spilling over its banks. But whatever the cause, I had no patience to do the delicately detailed drawing that I thought about doing all day as I worked, set out old towels and catchbasins, and went about what seemed like a normal if fractured business day in the studio. So when I found myself so tense that my back began to ache after ten minutes of drawing, I just let myself grab colors randomly out of my pencil box and took out my frustrations, obliterating the carefully drawn profiles the way that the flood waters are breeching the river's edge. At least nobody got hurt.
three old bent billiards, the New Yorker, a book of poems by Donald Hall, and a glass of cheap zinfandel, 8 1/4 x 11 9/16, watercolor pencil
Reader Comments (2)
Nice. Really. I've looked at every sketch you've posted to this blog. This one I'd filch if I could. Emotion, positive or negative, enriches art. (Hope your home recovers and you find the leaks in the roof.)
Thanks, Toby! You of course are right about emotion and art. There is no art without emotion.