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“Accepting what your drawings look like now is important. You cannot learn to make more effective drawings if you don’t first draw.

“… The point isn’t to make ‘good’ drawings. The point is to draw. Learn the feel of the pencil against the paper, the different angles you hold your wrist, the motion of your whole arm when you draw from your shoulder.”

Chris Gavaler and Leigh Ann Beavers, “Creating Comics: A Writer’s and Arist’s Guide and Anthology“, page 25

Note the term “effective” in the quote. Isn’t this far more useful for judging a drawing than “good” or “bad”? A drawing I am unhappy about can still be effective in what it teaches me.

Accepting the gap between where our drawing skills are today and what we wish they were is part of how we narrow that gap. Berating yourself for perceived shortcomings is a misdirection of energy, and won’t solve the issue, so keep the pity-party short and try again.

One of the most frustrating things for me is that when I do try again, I frequently end up with a result I am even less pleased about. I know it happens, I recognise it when it happens, and the more desperately I want something to turn out well, the more likely it is to not. I have a category I file these pieces under: Trying Too Hard.

I also know from experience that if I can keep going, I usually get to a satisfactory result. I don’t always try again, sometimes I stop drawing. Other times I change mediums so I can’t make a direct comparison between my next piece and the previous.

That’s what I did on the morning I drew the two plein-air pieces below. I was a bit ambivalent about my pencil drawing and swapped to watercolour for another go at the scene.

I changed the composition too, focusing in closer on a smaller part of the edge of the bay. I got it to a point where I was feeling happy, and stood up to get a photo, having forgotten how windy it was because I’d been so absorbed in my painting.

As I took the photo above, the wind caught the edge of the paper and blew it onto the pebbles. A bit of wild scrabbling and I was able to get hold of it fortunately. If you compare the bottom of the photos above and below, you’ll see the wind’s contribution to the painting, creating drips off the edge. I rather like it.

“What seems to happen as we grow older is that seeing becomes dulled. We begin to look in a practical manner just to get enough information to function. … We spend more and more time mentally running around, looking at one thing, thinking of another. …

In practicing seeing, allow your eyes to wander over your subject matter. Visually caress what you are looking at. … Realize there is a wholeness, but try not to stare to strain to see everything at once.

— Albert Handell and Leslie Trainor Handell, “Intuitive Composition”, page 12

It’s no secret that continuous line drawing is a favourite technique of mine, and doing it with ink not pencil, thus eliminating the option of erasing any part of it. While what I’m producing is a drawing, what I’m doing is focusing on looking and feeling my way around a subject rather than on my drawing itself.

Because the technique means the result is never going to be detailed realism, it frees me from worrying about trying to make it so, to simply draw and leave dealing with what I’ve drawn for later. There’s a certain stage at which I switch focus from looking to what the drawing is becoming and where I want to take the piece. It’s hard to quantify; sometimes it’s because I feel I’ve looked “enough” or “at everything”, often it’s because I feel like moving onto the next stage with other colours or mediums.

You don’t need pen and paper to do continuous line; you can draw it in your head, tracking as your eyes shift across and around a subject. It’s a drawing about looking, and looking some more.

“With landscape paintings, the wind’s always blowing, the light’s changing, the tide’s going in or out, but at home in a room the person can come back and sit in the same place with the same clothes on and it’s a deeper process, but it’s not so exhilarating. I’d like to mix the two processes up together.”

Jean Cooke, “Jean Cooke Profile” by Nell Dunn in “Jean Cooke: Ungardening”, published by the Garden Museum, page 65

I think one of the reasons I enjoy painting at the same locations repeatedly is because the familiarity of the landscape is a comfort zone, like being in my studio, but the differences each time because of the weather, season, time of day, tide, sea conditions, refresh the challenge.

As for wearing the same clothes each time, I know which of my various denim shirts I’m wearing from the colours of the paint on it. Today’s has a splash of gold on the left sleeve and a ‘librarian’ pinbadge that reads “Shhhh happens”.

“His paintings are reactions not representations … presenting with enviable vigour and dynamism a conspectus of landscape that embraces history, geography, art history, geology and archaeology.

… The paintings are equivalents of the landscape, and this is the landscape [Jeremy Gardiner] walks through, inhabits sporadically in his mind, and takes possession of fully through his imagination.”

Andrew Lambirth, “Vantage Points and Variable Perspectives”, in “Jeremy Gardiner: South by Southwest”, page 29

I’m pulling together a set of paintings for a forthcoming online exhibition with Fife Contemporary that all come from the same source of inspiration: beach pebbles. They range from representational rows of pebbles to abstracted paintings based on pattern and/or colour. I find it hard to write/talk about my reasons for painting these, but it starts with my getting mesmerised by small sections of beach as I wander along, and my enjoyment of pattern and colour.

There’s an array of colours in the geological mix of pebbles on the east coast compared to the fairly uniform black-greys of the volcanic rock of northern Skye. On different occasions my eye is drawn to different pebbles: stripes, circular, broken revealing the ‘inside’, white quartz, orange-and-white, conglomerate, red sandstone. How the water smooths and arranges the pebbles, how it changes with every tide if the pebbles are small, how at times sand hides rocks I know are there.

To try and find the words I need for an artist’s statement I’ve been delving into books on my shelves on artists who paint “non-representational landscapes”, which is what led me to the Monday Motivator quote above. I think “reactions” is a useful description. A painting such as the one below is my reaction-in-paint to the patterns and colours of pebbles. Painted wet-onto-wet so the colours spread and mix with not-entirely predictable nor controllable results, like the sea washing in.

“Most people consume media such as film, which is completely representational, so I think there is not a language that has built up through culture that is taught to appreciate a diverse set of imagery or shifts in this figurative reality. … a good abstraction can transport a viewer to places that are unexpected”

Emily Ferretti, in “Australian Abstract” by Amber Creswell Bell, page 110

The idea that “it looks like a photo” is what makes a good drawing or painting is so limiting in terms of the possibilities, yet you see it regularly on social media where it’s intended as the ultimate compliment. Learn the technical skills of representation, but don’t stop there. Don’t aim be a human photocopier, but to explore further.

Conversely, if you’re avoiding starting to draw and paint because of worries about not having the “talent” for “making things look real”, start by exploring colour, different materials, then head into composition. There’s a long way to be travelled along these paths without going through a gate called “realism”.

See Also: Following a ‘What If I…?’ Impulse When Painting