Wandering

I went to my first class at the Incinerator Arts Complex yesterday evening. It's an introduction to drawing and painting. I enrolled as a way of making up to myself for not doing the Textile Art course at Box Hill this semester. I'm hoping to be able to develop some skills in a more relaxed environment. So far I'm happy. Here is an exercise I did last night. The good news is "if it doesn't look like a page full of spaghetti, you're not doing the exercise right"

























The process involves looking intently at an object and not looking at the page. We were told to carefully follow our eyes with our hand marking on the page. Our eyes were supposed to wander slowly over the object. That's about it really--or as much as I could understand on a first try--I'm sure there's a lot more to the process. What amazed me was how differently I saw my object during the exercise. Previously I've been told that drawing is about "looking". This exercise somehow reset my looking process, so that I actually saw details and subtleties that I was previously unaware of. And thankfully the drawing wasn't supposed to look like anything at all, so no worries about showing it here. By the way, if you're wanting to learn more about this exercise, I think it's called "contour drawing".