Song for a Sleeping Girl
One more sketchbook page. I’ve been trying to get back into the habit of drawing every day. It came to me so easily when I was younger, you had to force me to stop drawing, and now it’s something I approach with dread. I think part of it is that I know now that I can make a picture look the way it appears in my head, and I’m not as obsessed with practice practice practice to get it right. I mean…. at 17 I could spend hours and hours trying to draw my hand or foot and make it look like a hand or foot. I would get annoyed in school if a teacher encouraged me to be “loose” because I felt like it was the lazy way to go, how could anyone be content to make a “loose” drawing until they had the skill to make a tight well rendered drawing? But it’s different now, I don’t practice… it’s almost kind of nice to go a few weeks or months without drawing because then I have to spend days trying to relearn how to control my hands.
Any way, I’m trying to get back into the habit, and I’m trying to enjoy myself… trying to erase the 5 years I spent at Parsons stressed out about not being good enough from my memories so that I can just make art and be natural about it again. Because I really did enjoy it once. I didn’t care if it was going to make me money, I just cared that one day I would be good at it. So I’m trying to remember what it was like to sit down with my sketchbook when I was 17 and just fill a page.
Also, the song I was listening to when I started this page is beautiful:
The Devics, Song for a Sleeping Girl
November 3rd, 2008 at 3:24 am
The cure for the emptiness of days, and source of courage to face the days ahead (which are never empty until they are made so), is to take complete charge of one’s life and experience the world beholden to no one. I do this by living with nothing but what I can carry in a backpack as a vagrant wanderer, supporting myself entirely by my own ingenuity and without money or a need for it (mostly).
It might involve asking for help, sometimes. It might involve committing crimes (okay it definitely involves at least a little of that). It might involve sacrificing some of our society’s pre-conceived notions about what a “proper” way to live is. But I’ll be damned if sleeping in a field and eating dumpstered avocados didn’t cure my hopelessness like nothing I ever imagined could.