Where do the shapes go when we learn we "can't" draw?
I kept seeing Lynda Barry’s name pop up online in various places a couple of months ago (probably because she was promoting her latest book, Making Comics) but I took it as a sign from the universe and finally put her books on hold at the library. When I started reading Picture This: The Near-sighted Monkey Book, I was delighted to see that it was a great compliment to Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way, which I was in the middle of working through.
Picture This is part memoir (Barry writes about parts of her childhood that made her doubt her artistic abilities, as well as her despair from a series of tragedies in the early oughts, including September 11th), part comic, part activity book, part instruction manual.
In Picture This, Barry asks:
What makes us start drawing? What makes us stop?
Do you remember when you realized you couldn't draw? I don't, but I do know that as an adult, I've been quick to make a disclaimer that I am not a visual artist. I'll tell people I enjoy watercolors and immediately follow it up with "but I'm not a painter."
Why is that? It's the act of doing something that allows you to claim the title, not the results.
I'm afraid that someone will look at what I've made and deem it "bad." But if I can say right off the bat that I just do it for fun, then maybe I can stop them from forming any opinion of my work, and I don’t have to face rejection.
My 6-year-old sometimes insists that he "can't" draw something. I encourage him to try anyway, but he gets frustrated, and it's sad for me. I love his drawings, which are so intrinsically him. Plus, he does seem to enjoy drawing. Often he'll come out of his room at night (long after he's supposed to have lights out...) with a picture of a unicorn for me.
I want him to keep drawing. I don't know why I don't want the same for myself.
Which leads to Barry’s next question: where do the shapes go once you stop allowing them in?
Barry's character Arna is told, "Creative people don't color, copy or trace. That's only for people with no imagination." But that's not actually true, and sometimes copying something is what loosens us up enough to make more art, to allow more shapes in. So Barry gently nudges you toward making shapes by copying, tracing, cutting, and coloring the images in the book. Her supply list is delightfully low-budget and easily accessible: Barry encourages using paper scraps, a toothpick, and a bottle of school glue to make collage pictures, or coloring an image with a q-tip dipped in a few drops of food coloring mixed with water.
I'm not sure if Barry is a fan of Cameron's work but I wouldn't be surprised at all if she is. Barry writes about noticing how the ink travels down the brush, and then across the page. She enjoys it so much she forgets she has any part in it. "The worst thing I can do when I'm stuck is to start thinking and stop moving my hands," Barry writes. Cameron would agree, I think, much the same way she urges artists to show up for themselves every morning to write three pages, longhand, getting out all of the crap that blocks us from letting God create through us.
Barry, too, believes in the physical act of writing— longhand, not tapping away at keys. In Picture This, she notes she was inspired to write a novel the same way she worked on her comic strip, writing with a paintbrush on a legal pad. This, she writes, gave the words a chance to come "unhindered by threat of instant death by delete button."
A lot of what Cameron talks about in The Artist's Way is not judging what you're making. It's not for you to decide, rather, it’s simply up to you to get it out. God is creating through you. “Accumulate pages, not judgements,” Cameron decrees. “You have to be willing to spend time making things for no known reason,” Barry writes.
A funny thing happened after I finished reading Picture This: instead of only using my watercolors to brush letter the date in my journal, or to do a color meditation, I started painting animals. A cat, a dog, a rabbit. It was highly enjoyable. I even gave a few of them striped shirts.
The shapes, it turns out, never really went away.
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