Persistence

I used four pages of paper in my current Moleskine sketchbook yesterday, and was dissatisfied with everything I did. I drew a pipe set on the arm of the Adirondack chair on the patio, then the mill on Trout Run Road, then a dark pipe cluster scrawl in the late afternoon gloom in my studio, and finally one more pipe sketch out on the patio before the early dusk. It just got worse and worse. I didn't care that the results weren't so bad. I cared that the experience each time delivered me to a deeper sense of futility. I didn't think I'd care to even try again today. But that's self absorption for you, I guess.

Today is different. I packed up a Thanksgiving leftover feast for my ex-wife and her husband to enjoy with our children this evening and sent it in a big cooler with Tina when she went off to church. Left some compliments for people who had posted photographs, pipes, and comments on Facebook and Google+. Pulled myself out of my putrid funk, threw the sketchbook into my black leather shoulder bag to go off into the countryside, then decided to wait for awhile out on the patio in the late November sunlight to see if an unreliable friend from Virginia would show up for a visit with his family on their way home.

The bag, just plopped down on the picnic table in the low angle light, and my now habitual urge to draw coaxed me into giving it another shot. And for whatever reason, it went pretty well. My stomach almost unknotted. I was able to enjoy what I was doing and seeing. I felt almost happy. Yesterday, Noble was discouraged with the results of her efforts on Trout Run Road, and I told her that she just had to work and work and work until things improved. I told her that some days it just stinks and you want to quit, but you never get good at drawing or anything else without going through the tunnel, and sometimes you simply have to forget about whether or not you can see a light at its end. Art is hard like anything worth doing. Persistence and faith when we have no hope can show us the way.

My old bag and a Talbert billiard on the patio, 11 9/16 x 8 1/4, Intense colored pencils

A short excursion

My twin 18 year old daughters Nora and Noble, wanting to do something fun with their dad (who does not think that shopping qualifies), allowed me to drag them over to Trout Run Road to do a little drawing (Noble and I) and photography (Nora) after I made them their favorite white flour oatmeal pancakes for breakfast this morning. As attention spans were limited and they had a date to meet their mom to go shopping in downtown Lancaster, it was a brief outing. But we did get out there, and as always, it was quiet and beautiful.

I'm beginning to feel a little stuck. Technically I mean, with how I'm drawing. Might need to change to a medium that gets more tone on the paper.

White Oak Mill, 11 1/2 x 8 1/4, Inktense colored pencils

White Oak Mill Farm

Another drawing of the mill on Trout Run, from the same spot next to the road. I might be working up to doing something larger and more involved - a studio painting. I don't know. What a glorious morning after Thanksgiving though.

Tower Road, New Holland

This from pulling off the road as far as I could without sinking my car axle deep in the mud this morning on the way back to my studio from Premier. I'll elaborate later when I have a bit more time.

The Mill on Trout Run Road

I was fortunate to grow up on a small farm south of Syracuse, New York, and have chosen to live in places that feel similar to my boyhood home for much of my adult life. The old weathered buildings, pastures and crop fields and land lying fallow, the tangled woodlots, all the secret, quiet places that still offer a sense of gentle separateness from an increasingly over developed comfort me.

Just a couple miles outside of town there's a short road that connects two county roads across a hidden inclusion of farmland and woods, called Trout Run Road. You'd miss it if you weren't looking for it. I found it several years ago while looking for isolated and seldom traveled routes on my bicycle. It led me down a sloping curve to a little valley with a creek running through it, and past a run down brick mill with an oddly proportioned old white plastered stone house with oversized columns holding up a sagging porch roof overlooking it from a small bluff, tucked up against a copse of trees along a low ridge. I returned some time later with a sketchbook in my backpack to draw it for the first time.

September 2007

 I've gone back many times, and taken a drawing pad more than once. I even dragged my wife and children there on a gray winter afternoon when they were still interested in going on such excursions with me.

sketch from our family field trip in January 2008

 This morning I went back, pulled my car off into the weeds, and walked a few hundred feet back up the road to immerse myself again in the magic of the place for a quiet hour, and to try again to transmit some sense of the wonderment of the place onto a sheet of drawing paper.

Trout Run Road, 8 1/4 x 11 9/16, Derwent Inktense pencils