Absences, and Le Art

Well, it's been a while! So long in fact that someone has commented on my absence, and family members who read my blog are calling me to see if I've died, or maybe just gone into a coma. Truth be told, I haven't been taking many good pictures, and/or I don't feel like posting. In the world of blogs, sometimes I just don't feel like I've done anything interesting enough to make people read about it, and from my Blogger stats, it looks like only 6 people read this thing on any given day. Although, I think that maybe the number's actually so large it confuses the internet into spitting out erroneous numbers. Yep. Probably that.

Anyway, over the next couple of days I'll try to post up some stuff I've done in the past couple of weeks. Rather than start with the older stuff, I'll go with what I did yesterday since it's still new and exciting to me.

I do some portrait modeling for an art league here in Asheville, and recently we've been meeting at one of the members' house since they're between facilities, waiting for the new one to be finished. This is the layout, with me missing from the model's stand.



It's a nice set-up and the woman hosting us is so gracious- coffee and tea for all, and sometimes people bring snacks. It's one of the more relaxed classes I've been a part of. There's lots of great art from this group, but for brevity's sake I'll just post one portrait of me, from the same day as the picture above.



So, with all of that as background, yesterday I finally scraped together the courage to join them to draw. They're all quite talented, and it's been such a long time since I've drawn, and I don't think I've ever sat down to do a portrait. I was slow to choose a medium and start (charcoal, graphite stick, water soluble pencil, conte crayon, conte pencil....) but eventually I chose a graphite stick and got down to it. I was thinking I would do a couple of sketches over the three hour period, but wound up just working on one drawing the whole time:



It's not a great work of art, but I'm very happy with how it went. Every time I draw after a long time away, I'm kind of astonished at how it all comes back. Like there's this talent that lies dormant and even though I don't see it or feel it, when I sit down to draw it's right there, same as always. That probably sounds like I'm full of myself, but there are many shades of 'talent', and there are so many people more talented than I am. My point is that the abilities that I can lay claim to are are still there, not that I'm God's gift to art. GOT IT? Good.

Now for some more practice.