This is part two of the School of Magic series.
Article written by
Radha Gomaty
Artist(Curator-Coordinator with EkaRasa)
The Secret is this...
WHILE DRAWING ,KEEP YOUR AWARENESS CONSTANTLY ON YOUR FIELD OF VISION...
TRY NOT TO GET CAUGHT IN FOCUSING HEAVILY ON ANY SINGLE DETAIL OF ANYTHING BEFORE YOU.
(It's actually a kind of new and really exciting practice!)
Make sure you keep your eye-shift movement from physical space to paper space MINIMAL as you draw.
Appreciate what your Magic Wand, that is your drawing pencil, can do for you!
Pressed hard, your pencil will give you dark lines.
Pressed with different pressures you get lines of varying darkness and lightness, thickness and thinness...
Very lovingly ,as you run your eyes over and over again along the shape of what you have chosen to draw, let your hand also move along with your eyes making pencil lines on the paper.
Sometimes you might forget to look at your paper as you are drawing. And when you do, you might initially find you have ended up drawing deeply felt intense and lively lines that however don't quite add up to resemble what it is you began drawing.
Good!!! Just allow all that to happen...
Keep taking swift looks at what it is that you are drawing and at your drawing of it as it develops...
ENJOY IT AS YOU DO IT.
There are no judges allowed in this School of Magic.
Don't worry if it's 'off' in terms of resemblance or whatever at first.
Don't worry if you are not able to bring in the sense of the space and of what you were looking at(let's say , the sofa) in it.
Don't worry if you suddenly forgot to keep your gaze loosely focused and resting in your Field of Vision and ended up getting more attracted to one thing before you over the other, or one part over the rest.
(When that happens you will find you unconsciously drew it bigger and out of sync with the whole! Try.
Come to think of it,isn't that what happens when we fall in love or go gaga over any one element/person/whatever?
We end up leaving out so much of the rest
We forget the context. We end up forgetting the whole!)
I told you earlier. It takes quiet absorbed practise and suddenly... Boom! You will find yourself in the Zone.
Are you done?
When you feel you are done ,just lift your hand off the paper and without changing your position ,JUST LOOK
... At what you were looking at and what you drew with your looking. Do it over and over...
Don't be harsh. Just observant will do. Because harshness will only make you deaf and blind.
Now quietly and solemnly date and number your sheet. If you like add a tiny initial in an unobtrusive corner.
Why?
Because you will need it to appreciate how much you have improved over the days and across the numbers.
Repeat.Keep at it.
Keep finding visually interesting nooks to draw... In a room of your house or your apartment area, your block, the street... Whatever...
Just learn to look from your Field of Vision Awareness.
And when you do,what happens?...
"What a Wonderful!"
As you train yourself to stay with the awareness of your Field of Vision, slowly your drawing will start communicating the feel of the space which shapes everything in the world.
You will be able to trust and rest in your Field of Vision as you sketch.
An incredible indescribable relaxed alert attentiveness takes over..
A kind of meditation really special to the secret practises of Magicians!
You will start feeling for yourself how every outline is just an ever-changing dynamic relationship between a thing and this space...
That a single line that follows your gaze shapes and alters both .
You will realise that, like building a wall is to 'wall in' something as much as it 'walls out' something, a line drawn on a surface excludes as much space as it includes when it turns into a definite shape…
You will exclaim when you suddenly are able to appreciate that what is 'excluded' by the sofa, the 'not-sofa',is also a kind of shape!
"What?! Hey!!!How come I didn't see it this way before???"
Good Question!
What came first?
Seeing? Or... Thinking?
When we look with attention and awareness, we begin Seeing... And this seeing itself becomes a form of Thinking, and of Creating...And the process takes you for the ride of your life!!!
No wonder the great artist, Paul Klee described drawing as 'taking a line out for a walk'.
Often though, it's the line that takes YOU out for a walk.
Or even a jog , a run and some impromptu leaps thrown in as well!
Paul Klee's Works
Just try it and keep challenging yourself .
Raise your own 'difficulty levels' by including more number of shapes or more complex shapes...
Clue: When you put together or compose shapes into an arrangement that satisfies your eye, do understand that you are just creating a SINGLE interesting shape with many components to it.
There are really no'separate'shapes! Never forget that Magician's Golden rule!
"This is not a bottle. That is not an umbrella. Those are not a pair of shoes." Remember to forget all these names. See it all as just one single shape,a beautiful interrelationship of line enclosing volumes of Space ...That's all there is to it!
I guarantee you that, that the love of drawing is an even bigger virus than the killjoy one bothering the world right now.
The killjoy virus thinks it has succeeded in turning most of our warmly physical relationships into more distant and colder virtual ones.Most of us are suffocated locked in without our friends.
But the Magic of Drawing helps because through it we learn to touch with our eyes... And we end up looking at the world with such fresh new eyes that nothing is 'boring' anymore!
By practising drawing the way I've described here ,we make friends with anything at all that we choose to draw... living or non living.
With your magic wand made up of a seeing eye, a feeling heart and a sincere hand holding a neatly sharpened 4B drawing pencil, you are inviting a 3D universe to enter, living and breathing ,into a your 2D little sheet of paper!
Now how cool is that!!
Once it gets to you, it opens another portal through your very own self same eyes and.... Hey presto!
You are a Magician!!!
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