REMINISCING

Opening a file folder this morning, I found a number of ten year old sketches, neatly clipped together and blatantly misfiled.  Strange, since I looked in this folder as recently as a month ago, read through it carefully, and these sketches were not there then.  I do not remember coming across them recently, so how did they get in there? 

(Cue the "Twilight Zone" theme music here)

But I was very happy to see them.  What surprised me most was that they were dated June and July of 2005, and yet I still like them.  They are pretty simple, but they really capture the people I was drawing. Everyone whose portrait I drew that summer was on staff at Omega. 

It was the first time I took Omega's annual week-long Drawing On the Right Side of the Brain workshop, which was taught by Lynda Greenberg and was superb.  (You can read the book and not do the work, but in this workshop, you have to do the work.)  I saw all the participants improve radically in just 5 days.  The show-and-tell at the end impressed us all with the dramatic differences between day one and day five.  I loved it so much I took it again a few years later.  But I digress. 

Here was my first attempt to draw a portrait.  This is a young guy named Alex who was on the Omega staff that summer, and when I ran across this sketch and the subsequent one, I found myself wondering what he looks like now, ten years later, what he is doing, and how he is faring in life.

The following day we had a chance to try again, and I produced this sketch of a young woman calling herself Nola.  Once again, I wonder where she is today and how she is doing.  I still love this sketch.  What amazed me was how much the finished pictures actually resembled their human models--they really looked like this.

Although I'm hardly a Leonardo, I must say I astounded myself with this portrait and still like it a decade later.  I loved every minute of drawing it too, I remember that distinctly.  The world disappeared while I worked on it.

Because I was apparently drawing faster than everyone else, I finished first and had time on my hands, so I snuck in another sketch while waiting, using another angle.

The other revelation for me was how much enjoyment I got out of doing the drawings.  I remember leaving the workshop wondering if I might become a portrait artist in later life.  Something that still interests me--at least, I am still interested in drawing more portraits.

A quote from much-beloved Jimmy Durante on what we think when we see ourselves:  "My nose isn't big. I just happen to have a very small head."