Last Tuesday I went to
Tease in Ashland and spent three hours drawing. It is true that I chatted, pontificated, blathered, exclaimed, and dished out innuendos but I also drank some beer. I had a really great time. I chimed in at some point, "I love that I don't have to talk about what my hand is doing".
I was able to snag the last drawing horse on the extreme left. (While attempting to Google "drawing horse" for an illustrative image, I became aware of the fact that most people are not familiar with a drawing horse. We sit on a hardass picnic bench and lean our drawings against a backing that sticks straight up from one end. They typically are stained from years of Pollockspasms and Graffittitus generated from neophytes.)
And what a horse it was! It was padded, level, clean, and artsy fartsy black. Choice. I glanced up at the small ring of attendees and first recognized the model Karin. "Hey Steve," she acknowledged. Sarah, was the second to look up from her preparations and say "Hey, Steve" (
she also just posted some of her drawings from the other side of the stage on her blog) and then
Anne said "Oh, Hey, Steve" at which point the person to my immediate right said in a playful tone, "Hey Steve".
I have sat next to
Gabriel once before at a
Doctor Sketchy session. I looked at Gabriel and thought "DAMMIT" because he was wearing a fantastic shirt. I was particularly stunned because before I left the house I had turned to Stacy and asked "Should I put on a special drawing shirt?" and she looked at me scornfully and said, "You look fine," and so I had left the house in a mundane t-shirt. Not even a logo. Lucky for me, there are more sessions on the 30th as well as the 7th of July so I will have time to redeem myself in the shirt category.
Tuesday night, however, I simply exchanged pleasantries and scrambled to get myself set up. They were already into the one minute gestures. I quickly glanced down the row past Gabriel and said hello to
Robert. Robert is unfortunately moving away from the Rogue Valley . It seems a person with his chops can't survive in this part of deep south/western Oregon. This is depressing and scary.
Sitting to the right of Robert was Johnny. Unless I told you that our drawing group was made of three men and three women, you might rightly assume that Johnny was a man. As it
is, the right side of the room was all women, and the left side of the room was all men (or at least males). Then we drew pictures of Karin. We all chatted. Some more than others. But ultimately, we all focused together.
I've had it wrong!
All these years!
All these years I have been envious of bands because they got to spend time with each other in real time. There is inherently a lag with painting. My mistake might have been in trying to create collaborative paintings as fulfilment of this desire to be in a band. It occurs to me tonight that I am a fool.
A good drawing session with a good model might be better than being in a band.
Sarah Burns, who was sitting to my right, was occasionally twisting her body away from her drawing and mechanically twitching. I thought, at first, that she had a piece of something in her eye. Then I thought Sarah was applying makeup because she was peering into a compact mirror. But it turned out that the twitching was because of the minute adjustments required to see her drawing and the model at the same time, in reverse, in a mirror the size of a sand dollar. 
When I tried this device on my own drawing, I crumpled. In the future, I will always carry a small mirror to help my proportions.
