The Drawing Club of Improbable Dreams by Cat Bennett

Author:Cat Bennett
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Inner Traditions/Bear & Company
Published: 2015-10-24T04:00:00+00:00

14 About the Sessions

“I found that things became a lot easier when I no longer expected to win. You abandon your masterpiece and sink into the real masterpiece.”

— Leonard Cohen

. . . . .

In the next chapters are three 8-week session plans. Our goal in doing the exercises is to explore openly rather than try to make finished pieces of art. We want to experiment, try out new ways of drawing, and make some good mistakes.

The first session is centered on basic ways to practice drawing. All of the exercises can be altered, or added to. The drawing exercises should help us look with care at the world around us, get comfortable with materials, feel able to draw what we want to and give us fluency with our hand as well as ideas for how to make our drawings our own.

In the second session, we’ll explore working with different materials and in different ways, painting, making painted paper collages and simple monoprints. The boundaries between drawing and other forms of image making are permeable. If we’re making a contour drawing with a brush, is it a drawing or painting? It doesn’t matter. But we’ll get lots of ideas for great ways to work.

In the third session, we’ll focus on growing our adventurous, intrepid selves and honing our individual visions by getting out of our comfort zones and working in somewhat unusual ways. We’ll try working on a bigger scale and collaborating too.

Later, we’ll see how the exercises can be expanded and altered so we can continue on.

Our purpose is to use drawing to unfold ourselves as artists. We can feel free to go over the edge of our abilities so we see where that edge is. There’s no progress without taking chances, and the only real mistake is holding back. Our goal is simply to be ourselves—who and where we are in this moment, fully and without hesitation, and to notice. And then continue to grow.

The exercises are designed so that we don’t know how things will turn out until we do them. Our job is simply to dive in then look and see.

Some exercises may seem hard to some of us. We may not yet have the skills or like working in a particular way, but we can grow a willingness to just try things. Some exercises will interest some of us more than others. We can try to let go of some of our preferences perhaps and just work. If we show up, something will show up to meet us.

Some things may feel too easy for some of us, but they’re not easy if we fully engage with them. How can we take things further? That’s a question we might ask. We can make every exercise a teacher if we focus and bring ourselves into it. We can watch for any tendency to evaluate too much and simply choose to engage. Any exercise can give us something of value if we engage with it. That’s up to us.

It’s helpful to let go of any investment in how things turn out and just allow things to be as they are.

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