Drawing shadows as a way to look.

One of my favorite ways to break the ice with people who claim that they can never draw anything resembling anything is to offer them to draw a shadow :) It is always better to start with something simple, but complex, like a palm with fingers or a flower. You will need a good source of light (be that a lamp or the sun) - which is a mood booster by itself :) And then you ask them to follow the contour of a shadow - it is a self-explanatory thing - and it does not take long. And then you have a page with a recognizable thing drawn just now! But even for people who do not need a pep-talk and for people who are good or even great at drawing, there is a lot of delight in tracing shadows, be that what you start with or add as a detail for a background. 

For me, shadow is such a different way of looking at an object - it magically opens up dimensions despite actually flattening a 3D object into a 2D view. You can spend some time finding the angle that matches your current whims and follow shadows within shadows if you want more complexity with multiple sources of light. I enjoy collecting shadows when I am in a museum looking at sculptures, and sometimes (for example, on a Ruth Asawa show), objects move, so you have moving shadows to draw! 

This agapanthus was fun to draw, but having that little shadow portrait made that page extra special for me - I understood some mistakes that I made after drawing the shadow too and it gave me more time with the flower - so I noticed more details and now am ready to go back and draw it again :)

A window between two books.

Two books have made a deep furrow in my visual world lately. It took some time to register that, and now I am not sure if I started to take more time to look at things before I encountered these books, and that is the reason why they had such an impact or the other way around. 

The first book was filled with words and had no images but what my mind conjured. I think if it had images I would be deprived of my experience with it. The second book is mostly visual but for me, it worked as an answer to the first one. 

The first book is a series of essays about Japanese aesthetics In Praise of Shadows by the Japanese author and novelist Jun'ichirō Tanizaki. It talks about paper and toilets and writing instruments and theatre and how the path of a country is altered, how progress and cultural cross-pollination bring development and growth and also confusion, departure, and loss. And that all of these are inevitable, destructive and creative, and hard to accept yet are happening and therefore are already a part of life.

The second book is Hammershøi in Europe - it is a collection of paintings by a Dutch painter Vilhelm Hammershøi. I saw some works by Hammershoi in other books before but never noticed them or looked at them as I did after reading "In Praise of Shadows". There are studies, portraits, and landscapes and also glimpses at the shadows under the table, the light reflected in a lacquered cabinet sofa, a cup on the table, painting on the wall, roof shingles, and tree branches. And windows and doorframes and backs of the chairs and people. 

These books for me are in a conversation about different ways to see light, about liminal spaces between the light and shadow, about very subtle feelings between places and periods of time, about a multitude of choices that were made and not made, and possibilities and delights of noticing. Perhaps it has something to do with my love for dust mites dancing in the sunbeams. 

I've been re-drawing some Hammershoi paintings to discern them deeper.

Sketchbook #106: Gouache #25 and other sketches in the forest