Here's why I don't take shortcuts

My current work involves a lot of drawing. I take small photographs and scale them up to large paintings (see my video below to watch the process).

These drawings are a struggle sometimes. Scaling up causes me issues with proportions and it can take a while for the figures to look 'right.' There's a lot of erasing and painting over as I work towards the eventual composition.

When I explained this on Instagram, I had people make various suggestions like 'you could use a projector' or 'try gridding up your canvas.' Now I have too much light in my studio for a projector and I despise gridding because - ugh - maths!

But there's another reason that I don't want to use tricks to get the drawings right. The history of trying is important to the paintings.

They're all about family history, personal history, and the way we construct our stories. I call it self-mythology - those things we repeat until they become the structure of our identity. Memories layer over memories to construct these identities. 

Now in the paintings, lines and paint are added and subtracted and edited in an attempt to get at some kind of truth. Isn't that. a perfect mirror of the way we construct our identities?

If I were to use a trick to make the drawing 'easier,' I would lose all that history.

I also feel the time invested is part of this. The paintings have a history all of their own because the evolved over time. They contain the struggle, just as we contain the struggles we have experienced.

So I don't judge other people who transfer photos, or trace images - but I know it's not right for this work. Just as you can't take shortcuts in life, you can't take shortcuts in art.

That said, I do have some techniques I use to correct what's gone wrong in a drawing and I share one of them in the video included with this email. 

As I work in this way, I am reminded that drawing isn't really about drawing at all - it's about seeing. It's about learning to circumvent our brain's tendency to try to take shortcuts. The brain wants to make things easy for us. So it will say 'you know what a hand looks like - there are five fingers, just draw them!'

The problem is that then we're not actually looking at the shapes in front of us, we are guessing at them. It fees quicker, but it never is. Because the human eye can spot errors even if we don't understand why - so viewers of a painting can instantly see if a hand is 'wrong' or a foot is moving in an odd direction.

Realism isn't always important of course. There are many amazing artists who portray figures without aiming for anatomical accuracy, and maybe one day my art will move in that direction. But for now it's important to me that the figures are accurately drawn so that I can then play with paint and with techniques in order to disrupt them, hopefully creating the feeling of memory. 

And so I battle with my drawings, working to overcome my limitations by erasing lines and starting again each time I make a mistake. The process is helping me learn to see more clearly, but it's also teaching me two other valuable qualities - patience and perseverance.

I have learned not to let frustration overwhelm me, but simply to keep working until the drawing is correct. 

Check out the video below to see just how many things I can get wrong before I finally land on a solution :)