Working so hard, it looks like magic

I grew up in a magical place where art was around me all the time.  My mother would decide an image was needed and she would sit down and quick whip it out.  She might have spent 5 minutes on it or an hour but I was always in awe of it.  It was amazing to me how easily it came to her.

As time went by, I eventually came home to doing art.  I resisted it for years, not wanting to do something that would be lost in her shadow until I found pastel.  My mother did everything else it seemed but this dry medium.  It wasn’t that she couldn’t have, she just never did.  I started working with it and when I had enough images that I felt I might be ready, I started trying to sell it.  Looking back on what I did and where I am now is fascinating.

One of the things I developed was an art practice. I work on art several hours a week.  I end up averaging one or two finished pieces a week that way.  Some are small (5x7) and others are much larger (30x40) and each one teaches me something new.  Recently I started doing apples to nail down light, shadow and color.  It was a workshop I took with Mike Beeman, and he introduced this exercise.  When I got home, I started doing apples to continue the learning and now I have several fruit studies that I have done.

Here comes the “A-ha” moment.  I am the president of a local community art school and we are doing an event.  While creating the promotional material with our Managing Director, I wasn’t happy with any of the images we were trying to use.  “We are an art school, can’t we come up with something artistic?” I asked.  “What about a piece of art we have or even a still life of drawing materials?”  Jodi was incredibly patient with my complaints and said she would work on it. 

Well, I am an artist with an art studio.  Why can’t I be more helpful and come up with something?  I got some drawing supplies, piled them up artistically and looked at it.  Nope, looks flat, I decided.  Well, lets put some color on the page.  That is pretty but it needs something.  How about an apple?  Quick swipe there, a small detail there and three more colors and Wha-La! An apple drawing.  I put the title of the event at the bottom and all of a sudden I had an epiphany, I was my mother’s magic.  I did it.  5 minutes and we had an image to promote the event.

Discipline and work, makes such things look easy; like magic.  I’m gonna keep working, I think it is paying off.