WAYS OF LEARNING…

I’m teaching myself to draw because I would like to be able to draw some ideas I have for editorial cartoons… some sharp and hard-hitting ones, I hope. I met a young guy at the camera store recently who is going to art school.

How I envy him; to have teachers to help you, tell you, show you, let you in on some of the ’secrets’, some of the simplified ways of proceeding that are effective, leave you be; to have time, to have that setting in which to work; the rays of comradaries with others who are wide open. It all sounds so wondrous even with the usual petty jealousies and egos sometimes permanently attached to air hoses.

But, my life has been different, more like the tsiganok road, the gypsy scholar. I have learned, mostly on the far back wall in my cave, most often in the tiny spaces I can pluck, pry from life, like picking time out of the tight corners of a walnut shell, for writing, for thinking, and especially for receiving thought and image and dream.

Tonight, I thought I’d share some of my struggle to learn this latest imperative; to draw; because I think there are a lot of peeps like me; who have heavy commitments of family, elders, animals, children, grandchildren, work, community, activism, and marvel sometimes to find one can actually make progress while riding a merry-go-round forward for miles and miles.

Somehow this week in addition to all other commitments–and learning to draw—and fix a broken faucet– I’m trying to get my ‘early flu shot’ because I’m considered in the ‘fragile group,’ which I hate mentioning even to myself… I was born with what used to be called ‘delicate health.’ Except my wings are broad and strong. Mostly.

So, here’s my plan for learning to draw. First, I’m cutting out pictures of different ‘types’ of cartoons/ drawings to try to get an overview of the stylistic field. I admire Ralph Steadman’s ink splatted cartoons; he was the editorial cartoon artist who accompanied/illustrated the madman Hunter S. Thompson in Gonzo. I like Ben Shahn and Speigelman’s Maus I and II.

And then there are the cartoonists who are lesser drawers to some extent, but who carry consistent sharp messages, like Oliphant. I notice that sometimes the message is greater than the draftsmanship and sometimes the draftsmanship is absolutely angelic, but the message is just eh, so-so. What would it be to have talent at both, I wonder.

Talent; one of the best definitions I know, is that talent is what comes easy. In which case I have no talent for anything, except possibly loving. I don’t recall anything else coming easy. I’ve had to work as hard as and sometimes harder than most to do elemental things, like learning to spell, to read, to write.

A few years back, I taught as an artist in residence in an elementary school and came across a teacher teaching ‘invented spelling.’ Wow, it was exactly my kind of blue highway. The emphasis was on the kids learning to write their stories instead of focusing on spelling the words right. Their parents, the teacher told me, often complained that they couldn’t read their kids ‘invented spelling.’ But I could, and realized I was a genius at reading such things. The weirdness of dyslexia will do that for you.

This teacher by placing emphases on storytelling and not ‘correct’ form, was allowing the songbirds to fly free in the children’s’ minds without putting harnesses on them and limiting their wingspans. I expect children who grew in this way, unencumbered by forms smaller than the vast well they were drawing from…though they would learn to spell correctly eventually, will now for all of life know what comes first in creative life is the story first, the tiny barricades and curbs to ‘standardize’ it, coming, most often, second.

Seeing the children take such joy in writing and illustrating their stories, again, made me wish I and others of my generation would have had that too. Instead, many of us were sort of all weirdly folded and stapled, before we could ride a bicycle; trees are always green and brown and never blue, never purple. But they are, I would protest, deep in the woods the bark is purple in dusk and the film under the bark is shiny silver.

But no. We’d not be having any purple or silver trees, or as I once drew, a red-headed friend with orange, and green fire in their hair. ‘That’s not real,’ said my teacher. But she must have forgotten that when you sit behind a red-headed child and the sun hits his hair, his whole head jumps into tiny rainbows on fire. So utterly awesome.

So, each time I draw, I still first have to drag aside all those lead curtains dropped down over the child artist, ones that fill the mind with endless questions of propriety rather than questions of wonder. However, I am making progress, I think. I now make

wobbly bean shaped stick figures I’ve gotten really good at. I can draw a stick arm with a mitt that has only three fingers but looks like a whole hand, pretty good. But like the brunette who wishes she were blonde, or the one with a talent for solving crosswords who cant figure out how to create one, I wish for far more.

Practice. Life drawing. I’ve been. The models for the evening, women and men, beautiful in their nakednesses twist their bodies into lovely creases and parabolas and if I don’t think too hard, the conté crayon on my page more or less captures at least the bulk and ….you can tell from looking my drawings, mostly, whether it is a male of female I’ve drawn, but then, I have the added help of a male model having unmistakable outdoor plumbing, so it’s not exactly my acumen that makes the difference I’m afraid.

So, I am practicing. I put my family in sofa jail so I can draw them, try to arrest the cats of friends into some slow-mo, draw the huge guardian cottonwood outside as it is changing daily, losing more and more of its leaves, showing more and more its bones.

And I have these two ideas especially that keep returning to me for editorial cartoons, (I know, only two seems awfully impoverished, but it’s what has been given thus far, maybe there will be more later…) and I will, I think, put them up on TMV at some point. Once I draw them, that is. There ‘s this thing I experience with my writing that I also experience with my drawing…

I see it all in its nearly complete form in my mind so clearly, so purely, and it is so beautiful, but… getting the idea, the concept, the image, from my inner eye to travel down my left arm and onto the page, to make my fingers not too tight, not too loose, to not think too much, to allow the thing to make itself, to try to watch over the process with kindness and acuity somehow… that’s the challenge.

But, no matter what, the picture never matches the picture. The writing never matches the dream. Sometimes close. But often enough, no ciggie.

Yet, I think of how I learned to write, with one hand literally tied behind my back. How I became ambidextrous. How sometimes you do your best if you don’t know the way you are going about it is odd or even burdened, and you just proceed, crippled up and all, and even then, often enough, at least with practice, something useful, good and graceful in some way, might come through.

That would be the blessing I’d like most to pray onto all of us.

Stay tuned. I will let you know how the self-taught, learning-to-draw editorial cartooning goes.