I do not look at photographs of the animals I spot out of doors. I do not draw from photographs. Then I would be drawing a photograph. I would rather draw an animal.
I draw them as I see them. Or rather, as I remember them. Once I realized that drawing was an act of memory it freed me up a lot. For example, I see a bird in the sky and make a corresponding mark on my paper (without looking at the paper). This is one of the fundamental exercises of learning how to draw.
Or, I see a bird in the sky and subsequently, looking at the paper, draw what I remember seeing. If the bird is very still, I can compare my drawn marks with the reality of the bird. But even the millisecond it takes to compel my fingers to move from the initial impulse in my mind, harnesses an act of memory. Artistic training of all kinds equips the mind and muscles with a grammar of marks that approaches accepted visual accuracy. But that's not seeing. That's identifying the seen thing based on a cultural consensus.
The compulsion then, very Zen I suppose, is to inhabit the edge between seeing and recognizing seen things. Maybe what I really value here is the excited retina just as it passes the data off to the brain to be analyzed.
 |
| 04-06-21-squirrel |
 |
| 04-13-21-robin |
 |
| 04-15-21-heron02 |
 |
| 04-09-21-swan02 |
 |
| 02-27-21-muskrat02 |
 |
| 01-30-21-ducks01 |
