Part of a Cure - Austin Kleon's weekly newsletter on Friday 2nd of this month contained the lovely thoughts on drawing below. For anyone who doesn't know of Austin Kleon, he is a writer and artist living in Austin, Texas, author of Show Your Work and Steal Like an Artist. His elegant blackout poems are beautiful to look at, and their haiku-like sparsity of words thought-provoking. Do visit his super Blog on his website to read the rest of this post, and so much more. You can subscribe to the newsletter here - it's a really good one. Austin Kleon is extremely generous and puts in a lot of thought and hard work to make his newsletters a good, informative read. It arrives every Friday, and I always look forward to it.
I am sure most of these quotes will ring true for anybody who draws:
“When you draw, you go away. You go to another place. It’s a safe place. And it’s a real place.” - Ed Emberley
“A piece of paper is a place. The thing you draw with is the way you travel through that place.” - Lynda Barry
“I make places I want to go to.” - Renee French
“It’s sublime to go into another room and make pictures. It’s magic time, where all your weaknesses of character, the blemishes of your personality, whatever else torments you, fades away, just doesn’t matter.” - Maurice Sendak
“Everything was a secret. So in order to make my own secrets, to establish my own way out of things I couldn’t understand, [I drew]. And it’s a way of not just escape, but of survival.” - Jules Fieffer, on growing up in his childhood home
“Drawing is 50,000 years old, isn’t it? I think it comes from very deep within us. When all those people in the 1970s were trying to give up drawing, I did go and see them and they said: ‘Oh, you don’t need to draw now.’ And I did point out: ‘Well, why don’t you tell that to that little child there? Tell them you don’t need to draw and see what happens.” - David Hockney
“Drawing is my way of explaining to myself what goes on in my mind. It’s not I who makes this drawing. It’s the hand that drew that makes it.”- Saul Steinberg
“As kids, we went to the page to find something, to have an experience. As adults, we have it backwards. We think that we need to have an experience before we go to the page". - Lynda Barry
“It’s more like I’m having an experience than making a picture.” - Cy Twombly
“A little girl was in a drawing lesson. [The teacher] said, ‘What are you drawing?’ And the girl said, ‘I’m drawing a picture of God.’ And the teacher said, ‘But nobody knows what God looks like.’ And the girl said, ‘They will in a minute.” - Ken Robinson
“Drawing isn’t work, it’s a form of prayer.” - from Christophe Blain, Isaac the Pirate.
Thank you for reading,
A big cheery wave and best wishes to you all!
Heather
✍️