patience required
Saturday, December 8, 2012 at 8:34AM It's Saturday morning. I spent the afternoon and evening yesterday driving to Philadelphia International Airport to meet my daughter Nora as she arrived home for the holidays, exhausted from her first semester as a college freshman at a university in Guadalajara, Mexico. Her twin sister Noble is completing her projects and getting ready for final exams and studio critiques this coming week in her first semester of art school, but despite her work load, couldn't wait until Friday to see her sister. So we burrowed through rush hour traffic into the center of the city, picked her up and found a crowded and noisy English pub near Rittenhouse Square for a little reunion dinner. Between shoveling food and badgering her sister to stay with her for the weekend to reconnect, see her school, and meet her roommates and her boyfriend at Penn, Noble showed us progress photos of a graphic design studio project on the screen of her smartphone. The panel is a highly detailed exercise in pattern and theory, rendered in a range of carefully mixed grey values with opaque watercolor paint. So far, she has more than 15 hours invested, and she's a little over half finished.
I thought about the work that Noble is doing in her freshman art and design courses and remembered my own experience 38 years ago. How hard it was. How many kids washed out that first year. All those hours of developing the skills and the patience required to create art that might not ever provide the means to a livelihood. So, I couldn't let myself succumb to the easy excuses of what a hard week I think I had juggling an array of design projects in different stages with varying demands. Cooking and cleaning up after meals. Shuttling my son to school and negotiating his ups and downs. Going to meetings, running my business. Worrying about expenses. I picked up the sketchbook out of a pile of plan, elevation, and specification printouts littering my worktable, dragged a chair to a spot at the far end of the studio, and filled another page. It doesn't matter that I don't like what I produced. It doesn't matter that I couldn't focus and muster the patience to do a really compelling drawing. What matters is that I did something instead of nothing.
saturday morning before work, 8 x 11, 2B graphite pencil
Reader Comments (1)
It's better than you think. I love it, but then again, I love the space. That's a vantage point I don't see because I never go behind your desk.