“What is play when drawing… drawing for drawing’s sake I guess. Play has no expectations, no projected outcomes, it’s a journey of discovery that so many of us feel we’ve lost. It’s a headspace full of empty and just being. It’s drawing in the sand with a stick, with a finger on misted glass, it’s pulling hands through wet paint and daubing it somewhere. It’s doesn’t ask for validation or approval, it just is.”
Carrie Stanley, Making a Mark of Existence
How do you get yourself to pull a pen across the surface of a piece of paper with the same ease and insouciance with which we pull a twig through the sand as we sit at beach?
A twig-in-sand drawing is inherently impermanent; if the wind doesn’t erase it, the tide will. So it doesn’t matter what we draw.
A pen-on-paper drawing is but one piece of paper and a few millilitres of ink; if you ruin the sheet, turn it over and have another go.
It feels counter-intuitive but it helps to use ink rather than pencil. It forces you to respond what’s happening in the drawing rather than being able to change your mind by reaching for an eraser. Aim to accept that mistakes are inevitable, let them be, and keep going to see what happens.
Accept that it’s about the doing not the result. About putting down ink on a surface, about playing with lines, not predetermined outcomes.
