Practice Random Acts of Drawing

What a saga this weekend was in the studio!  Who said that evolution was a slow process....I zipped from creation to ultimate destruction in almost no time at all!  Whatever I told you on Friday I was all excited about...well I have nothing to show for it, except a big hole in a piece of paper where I cut out the main element....my last attempt to salvage a lost experiment, which turned out to be its ultimate death. Although I can't be sure, because for the life of me, I can't even find that part I cut out, which is why all I can show you as proof of this whole endeavor is this:

At the point where I cut this out, I had already begun the destruction of the piece, because I'd determined the scale was all wrong, so I trimmed it at the top and bottom.  Even though I already knew it to be true that I'd trimmed it too close to the bottom of the "mysterious object", I showed it to John, whose first and only comment was, "it's trimmed too close to the bottom"....I knew that, but I was hoping it wasn't THAT obvious.  So then I thought, aha, rather than attaching some fancy fringe to the bottom (just joking!), I'll just cut this strange form that most closely resembles a chrysalis, and release it from this page altogether, which isn't working in the least and I'll give it a new life some other way. I did that and I swear that thing must have hatched and flown away, because I can't find it anywhere! Who knows and who cares where it is now...I've glad to be done with the thing. However, I must tell you that I'd spent a lot of time, sewing a gazillion soft lavender beads on that little form, along with the countless stitches and the pattern of punched holes.  Enough said....about that anyway.  Easy come, easy go, as they say.

So, the thing that I was most enamored with in that disappeared form is that it started out just as a plain sheet of Japanese paper dipped in beeswax. I had another nice little square of that in front of me on the desk....what would happen if I just crinkled that up, which I did immediately and to my delight found myself confronted with the most beautiful marks and I saw them right away as random acts of drawing.  I felt at home....I was back inside myself, speaking my own language....and I saw that with my failed experiment, I'd been trying make something sleek and elegant, but it never had that quality....but here right in front of me, were elegant marks made just by crumpling a piece of beeswaxed paper....so random, so beautiful....here's most of that sheet still intact below.  I envisioned using bits of the page here and there for collage and once again, my hands were quicker than my head...I began tearing it apart.

In the end, I went back to making the work I'd been making...a few Spring Meditation drawings and another Botanical (or is it some animal form?) Specimen.  Don't we always just come full circle!

Spring Meditation no.5

Spring Meditation no.6

Spring Meditation no.7

Botanical Specimen no.4

text reads: this or that or the other thing

I was inspired by the notion of practicing random acts of drawing to make a treasury with that in mind.

Here's a link to the treasury that is full of inspiring works...at least to me!!!

Random Acts of Drawing

See you tomorrow...I encourage you to practice some random acts of drawing...or look for them...they are everywhere around you!