Catfacehorse

I picked up these shell fragments on my brief summer holiday in Apollo Bay a few months (weeks, Owen tells me it was only weeks) ago. I liked the colours and shapes of the shells, as well as the fact that they were not particularly pretty or perfectly formed on their own.  It was also good to paint something slightly less two-dimensional than feathers or leaves.   I’ll be looking around this week for something else to put on my drawing desk to  paint - a challenge when I like to paint natural things and I live (happily) in a very industrial environment. I like the complexity of these little found objects, and getting to know them well, by looking at them really, really closely. I have a weird fascination for macro photos for the same reason. My grandmother’s theory is that short sighted people like myself see things close up in minute detail while everything else is a blur, therefore we must have a natural affinity for fine detail (although that is probably how we ruined our eyesight in the first place).

Here are two feathers I have painted over the last two nights. It has been such a relaxing way to unwind after work - they are almost meditative to draw with all their tiny lines.

I noticed the blog has been very greyscale lately, so I painted the coloured feather to change the tone a bit. Then I ended up painting another black and white feather I had lying around as well.

On another note, there is a wonderful Etsy shop set up by good-hearted arty people who have donated their goods with all proceeds going to the Red Cross Victorian bushfires appeal. I bought a beautiful print by Bridget Farmer, destined to go on my desk at work.

Reading A Short Course in Intellectual Self Defense this morning, a section on the construction of perception jumped out at me. Our brains have an amazing capacity to construct our perceptions  so that our world appears full of stable phenomena. I learned this way back in high school psychology, but it just struck me this afternoon that here might lie part of the joy of drawing for me.

Our brains perceive an object as having constant qualities, even though changes in light or position can change the object’s appearance. For example, I will see my familiar red bedspread out of the corner of my eye as red, even though peripheral vision doesn’t register colour. Mastering drawing depends on you tricking your brain into seeing things the way they really appear, before some of that interpretation. I need to actually see that the box isn’t perfectly square, it’s skewed towards me; that the arm pointed at me isn’t long, it’s foreshortened. For me, that flip into the seeing that you do for drawing is like magic, like seeing both sides of the visual illusion or seeing the 3D image in a magic eye picture. It also takes a fair bit of concentration for me, which is part of the fun.

Below is a picture I drew nearly three years ago that broke a long drawing drought and was followed by another long drawing drought. It took me ages, nearly two hours, as I needed to concentrate really hard to see the form of the objects, rather than perceive a lemon, capsicum and garlic.

Finally, I have been able to face the computer. Melbourne has been suffering through an unprecedented heatwave, and after work I have only been able to loll in front of the fan with a glass of iced water in my hand and a wet towel on my head.  (Not a pretty picture, but I’m a practical girl.) It has even been too hot to hit the beach until the weekend. See others suffering through the heat at The  Rachel Papers, Loobylu and Kirin Notebook.
Today I made it out to one of the city beaches. The water was a bit murky and there was a fair bit of rubbish left on the beach from the heavy use it has been getting over the last few days, but the water was cool and salty, so it fulfilled requirements. This was a big step for me - I grew up going camping in a pretty remote bit of Tasmania’s coast. If there was one person at the other end of the beach a kilometre away, we considered it crowded.  This afternoon, on the way back to the tram, I found this seagull feather in the sand and picked it up to paint later.