drawing drawing drawing
The way that I draw feels so different to how I would draw when I was younger. I would always view drawing in a sketchbook as a way to make a masterpiece, yet I would never do any real planning. I would only ever sketch silly doodles that I put way too much thought into. If I started drawing something and it didn’t immediately look how I wanted it to look, I usually wouldn’t even erase, I would just go to a new page, leaving the lines that I viewed as a failure to live alone on the page they sat in. I would only ever draw on the right side of the sketchbook, telling myself I would go back and use the other side when I needed more pages and more space, but never actually doing it. So many old sketchbooks of mine are pages and pages of white graveyards.
And then I started ceramics, which is an entirely different vehicle for making. On one hand, I could bring my drawings into the physical plane which is fantastic, and makes the child in me so happy to see these things existing three dimensionally in front of me. On the other hand, clay is only forgiving up to a certain point. When drawing, I always have the option to erase (so long as I’m using graphite). Once a piece is fired, there’s no erasing. If I glaze something and end up hating it, yea I can refire it, but I can never erase the history that is already present In the piece.
Because I’ve been viewing making work in this way for years now, it translates back into my sketchbooks. I fully stopped drawing for quite a while because it just didn’t hit the same as molding clay. Recently, drawing has called me back like an old friend, and mindlessly sketching and putting lines on paper for the sake of filling the page feels so right. I adore the faint lines of graphite that are left behind by an eraser. Seeing that physical history is so beautiful to me. I try to eliminate the negative space around a doodle as much as I can, or at least do things to make it feel more intentional, more interesting.
Translating my drawings onto the surface of my ceramics is so enticing. It feels like my childhood best friend and my adulthood best friend meeting each other, and falling in love. My silly sketches of half baked characters and ponies now have purpose and that is so exciting to me!!!
