drawing

drawing for me falls into distinct phases. i remember being very visual as a child & how, at some point, i realized i was becoming less so. when i read a book, i really didn't experience the words as words but as a dim set of imagery, something like a movie i was making up as it went along. i had a sense of loss after i began only reading words, the sense & sound of the words becoming something i was afterwards conscious of noticing.

in the earlier part of my life, i drew constantly. i liked to use pencil, ballpoint, felt-tip pens. i must have started by drawing monsters. then i entered a long period where i only drew cars.
in both these periods i used elements of things i had seen, but much else i had never seen. at the end of my car period, i could draw much of the underlying structural detail of the cars from memory. style had become as important as the quality of detail.

taking an art class in high school, after i had more or less reached a static point in my drawing, was a revelation. i fell in love with color & abstract art. although before this i had gone through a short phase of painting impressionistic landscapes in watercolor on dampened paper (a technique i discovered for myself), this was a new kind of art for me.

i eventually studied oil painting in great depth--without great commercial success. (the effects i was striving for were too idiosyncratic, for the most part.) on the other hand, i began to avoid a "too-studied" look to my drawing, & to prefer the "wild" look of children's & naive artists'. to achieve this end, i stopped drawing with my right hand, & took up drawing with my left exclusively.

that's where i am today.