30 Days Have September... and November

In November I accepted a challenge to produce 30 Drawings in 30 Days, only one month after I participated in a 30 day painting challenge in September. The whole process is quite a revelation. I could only manage twenty pieces in September...I would breeze through some...and the others became something of an endurance test. November's challenge went a lot smoother.

I get ideas faster than I can execute them, I have lists...and I enjoy working with a variety of media. The downside of a fountain of ideas can be a hectic approach to my studio practice... half starts left abandoned for the latest sparkly thing, and the thread left dangling. On the other hand, with commissioned work and when preparing for a show I am motivated and summon a great deal of discipline. I suppose you could argue that an artist needs all of these elements to produce work. However, I was feeling a little adrift.

Limiting attention to one piece of work for one day and only one day has improved what I have come to regard as well...a flabby focus...and focus certainly must be a kind of muscle strengthened by use. While some of the daily stuff I did is kind of hohum, I was also surprised by a few smallish things that stand on their own and developed some good studies for future work. My technique has a new fluidity... by slowing down, and looking just a tad longer at where the direction of the image is headed I am experiencing the unexpected and very pleasant benefit of completing a visual passage with less of a struggle. I have regained an enthusiasm for the small details that make for craft. For me, it all boils down to a meditation upon the object and its function in telling a story.

September and November generated a return to basics... something like a musician practicing scales and finger exercises. I'm sure I knew some of this before, but somewhere along the line I forgot.

I'd like to thank Caren Marie Michel for bringing both of these challenges to my attention.

Below is a little montage of some of the drawings completed last month. One of September's lessons led me to limit the size of the November images...this helped me to rein in some of what I found to be unrealistic expectations as to what I could accomplish within a day. They are all 4 x 3 "- I used an HB pencil on boards with varying tooth.