The Deep Well of Creativity

A friend of mine from my writers’ group recently inspired me to join a weekly life-drawing session with her at the Nepean Sportsplex. It’s been more than thirty years since I did any life drawing. Back in high school, you could have found me, on any given day, huddled over a large sheet of pastel paper, drawing from a live nude model in my life-drawing classroom. We life-drawing students had a bit of a mystique about us among the other students in the school. We got to sit and look at naked people as part of our education! Well, to be honest, the male models wore jock-straps. But most of the models were female, and they were totally nude. I can attest to the fact that women were much more hirsute in the late 70s, which is one of the reasons they didn’t need to wear any kind of covering for modesty’s sake.

There’s something absolutely glorious about drawing the nude human form. When you get it right you feel like a god! Every muscle where it should be. The bone structure evident in the proper lines and angles of the body. When someone…anyone…looks at a drawing of a person, they can instantly tell if it’s even just a little bit off. They might not always be able to identify exactly what is wrong, but they just know in their bones that something is wrong. That’s why life drawing is such a challenge. You can draw a pot of flowers sitting next to a bowl of fruit and no one’s going to know (or care) if the pot’s too big in proportion to the bowl, or if the apples aren’t shaped just as they should be. Life drawing is completely unforgiving that way.

I did a lot of life drawing in high school. I got pretty good at it too, after three years of almost daily practice. But, since graduating in 1977, I’ve only occasionally pulled out my pastels and done a drawing. You could probably count on one hand the number of times that happened.

And I know why. It was because, after high school, and every work day since then, I get up every morning and proceed to be creative on demand. I was just too damned burned out every day to come home and start drawing, to be creative some more, even in a way that I chose. And for the most part, I did very little freelance graphics too. Same reason. The most consistently creative thing I’ve done since high school, besides my jobs, has been creative writing. Even that practically dried up overnight ten years ago when I was hired on as the production manager at the Ottawa Business Journal. Not to diss OBJ…it was an awesome place to work, and I loved my job. But it was So. Intense. I’d get home after work and feel like an empty husk. I guess I just gave it all to my job.

Happily, now that I’m working for myself, there is much less stress and I’m finding the writing urge has come back and I’m actually more than a third of the way through the first draft of my first novel… The Bog.

And, thanks to my friend, Phoebe, I’m now drawing again too! And you know what’s amazing? It’s coming back to me. Even after more than thirty years of almost complete abstinence, when I pick up a pencil or a stick of conté in that odd way that artists use, holding it between the thumb and forefinger like you’re passing it to someone, something clicks back into place and…oh my goodness…I can still do it!

I can’t tell you what a thrill that is for me.

I’m quite rusty, of course. Not nearly as confident or skilled as I was when I graduated from high school. But it’s still in there. And it’s coming back. I surprise myself every time I pick up the tools and start to draw. Things actually look kinda right! It makes me so happy to see it.

I’m not saying this to brag. I’m saying it to make the point that creativity doesn’t die inside you if you let it go, even for a long time. It’s like riding that proverbial bike. You get back on after even a long hiatus, and you may be a little shaky, but you stay upright and after little bit you’re whizzing along just like you used to. It’s quite astonishing, really. And so, so gratifying.

(P.S.: That picture up there is Bill Maher, the comedian. I was watching his stand-up comedy special and decided to try a caricature of him right from the TV.)