Mendocino Workshop

Open Studios was a great success and I thank you all for coming north to visit the studio. It's good to see old friends, and meet new people---many of whom I have "met through this blog.

I am now in Mendocino at a Life Drawing Workshop with Michael Markowitz. a San Francisco artist and instructor. This guy has some great energy and lots of information and even after one day I feel that I have been challenged and pushed. It looks to be an exciting and fruitful week.

When I travel, I use a list for my packing. There is the standard list that includes all of the basics, and the specific list that I usually make the night before I leave. I started doing this when I was a pilot many years ago in West Texas---the laminated checklist that you go over carefully each time you take off. I was even trained to touch each item with my finger so nothing was overlooked. I should have done that with my packing list as I walked off and forgot my camera. This means that posts of this experience will rely on words, rather than photos of people, places or drawings which is kind of interesting since the experience is all about leaving the verbal and concentrating on intuitive visuals. And keeping with that paradox, here are a couple of poems that I wrote this morning:

Day One---Get Your Hands Dirty

A new approach to drawing--

being present and open so that I might

capture the essence of the

divine in

each pose,

Forget

gauging proportions, I

have to go deep

inside

just to

keep from

letting

myself fall into the

naturally

occurring

pattern of

quickly

roughing out proportions.

Spirit is what this is about.

Treading in different,

uncharted

venues of drawing

without being afraid to

express

your entry into another

zone.

Here's another:

Drawing from Life

Being in an intense life drawing workshop is an interesting experience.

Ten people have gathered with like intention for one week.

Most of us enrolled simply to improve our drawing--

to learn some new approaches, or get a kick start in what we do.

It’s a focused week of drawing from the model.

This is what I notice.

When we draw, we are pulled into one body,

not that of Isaac, our lithe and expressive model,

although he is certainly the catalyst.

No, in a very mysterious way,

we become a body ourselves,

united in the common goal of making marks to express our response to what we see,

which is Isaac in some very remarkable poses that only last a minute or so.

In those moments, we go away, and the sound of compressed charcoal dragging across smooth newsprint becomes

background music to this new entity born of seeing.

Between poses, our instructor, Michael, probes the experience by asking questions that frankly are a little cloudy and enigmatic.

I think he is trying to coax us into self-awareness,

in order to help us get to a deeper level of relationship—

with ourselves, the model, the marks.

Our responses are usually questions in return,

tentative attempts to describe what just happened,

or, more commonly, how we think we fell short.

This is not territory that lends itself to verbal acuity.

Words, when chosen carefully, can crack the shell that holds old patterns,

but the tap, tap, tap, however well intentioned,

can feel so invasive.