Managing my energy has been the name-of-the-game recently. My goal of drawing at least once a week and posting the results here has been a struggle to carve out time and make sure I have the right amount of energy for the concentration needed. It's also been about forgiving myself for not making the drawing a priority and letting a Friday or two slide.
Today I've taken the day off work - a mini holiday on a weekday. It took me a few hours to shake the guilt of not being at work; completely part of my own life-perception and nothing coming from my workplace at all. I have been out walking in the wind and the rain and finally my brain has accepted that it's okay to be at home on a Friday.
I'm so fortunate to live somewhere where the walk to the food market is a scenic one if I decide to go via the river. The weather has been blowing in and out today: wind and rain and sunshine and gusts of all three. Watching the grey rain clouds scud across the sky and the choppy surface of the Panmure River is a fantastic backdrop for the Rotary Walkway I walked down to Nosh Food Market on the Highway.
I wasn't the only person taking advantage of the large tables and good coffee at Nosh this morning. Housewives of Pakuranga catching up over moccocinos, business meetings about social media, older residents coming in to read the paper and sip their coffee before shopping for their dinner - I wasn't really expecting the place to be such a hive of activity - but it was really nice being there and letting the suburban life blow in and out the automatic doors as I drew the shelves of condiments and tried to figure out the reflections on the polished concrete floor.
Drawing is a lot like life: you've got to keep going. The beginnings can be shaky, and the confidence can faulter as you draw in the 'wrong' places and it becomes obvious your scale is off kilter - but you keep going. "More on," I say to myself. Keep refining the edges; keep updating the contrast; concentrate on the cross-hatching; refine that edge. It's not a photograph, it's an exercise, it's an interpretation, keep going, more on the page.
I see the fantastic drawings of artists I admire on Instagram and I know that's what they do. They fill their pages from edge to edge and don't stop until they're done. So more on, and keep going, and in the end it's a culmination of all that concentration be it lines or notes or laundry; in the end, it's the satisfaction of sticking to it and getting it all done.
