Years ago, when my daughter Shannon was ten, she was interested in art and asked if I would take a class with her. When I was her age, I would draw during long church meetings, but never thought of myself as a budding artist. We found a teacher, and once a week, went to Victoria Valentine’s house for lessons. She had the name of an artist, I thought, and that carefree look about her, too. This would be fun. From the first lesson, I was hooked on drawing. I never drew trees or flowers, only faces. I was fascinated with every detail of the human face–the line of the cheek, the chin, the mouth, especially eyes.
I soon found that the right word for drawing was not fun–it was work. If I did not pay attention to every detail, the face that I formed on the paper bore no resemblance to the person I meant to capture. How to render a likeness of what was real became my determination. Everywhere I went I drew. I must notice everything. As I moved from charcoal or color, I discovered the myriad of colors in a human face–the grays on the eyelid, the blue beneath the eyes, the red as the lip curled upward. But there was much more to see than color and contour. What exactly was in the person’s expression? Were they sad? Happy? Pensive. Wistful. I also learned that I must look at what is in the seemingly empty spaces.
After a few years of exploring art, I put away my charcoal, pastels and oils and returned to writing. My medium was once again words. I found that drawing faces and people had taught me much about writing. Both kinds of art begin with a blank sheet of paper. Both need to capture a likeness of what is real, as exact as my observing eye can create. Drawing taught me how to see. But art is so much more. I learned that I must search not only by sight, but by hearing, touching, tasting, smelling. And most of all, to find and to capture what cannot be seen: feeling, and emotion.
Both, to draw or to write, are a search for what is true.