Sketching carrots
Painting is something to do with love. It's an act of love to the world. I am trying to sort out some of the images on my computer, and it is the little, two-minute sketches that I had forgotten, from years back, that make me realise that I have heartstrings, and that they can be tugged. I have an ink and wash sketch called "preparing sunday lunch", with little rounds of carrot chopped up on a board, and the peeler by their side, and three potatoes lolling near the board, and a photograph of this would not have made me catch my breath. It is the memory of the love that prompted it - the love towards the world, towards the quiddity of things in the world - that made that happen. When a person draws something, they stop for long enough to notice the curves of it, the tones in it, its placing, the shadows it casts and that are cast on it. Your whole being is concentrated outside of itself, on an intent and eager focus on something that is almost always just provisional. Even if you are sketching the pyramids, you are doing it on a particular day, from a particular place, in a particular light. And so every sketch says, "Look! We are alive! We are in the world! And what a world!"
There is ego caught up in publishing art - in publishing novels or poems or sketches of carrots, but that thought can get in the way of the good impulse to share something. And the sharing doesn't have to be impressive: it is enough just to share an experience or an overheard line, or a funny moment caught on an iPhone camera.
That's why I love Facebook - and Twitter, and Goodreads-except-for-the-bad-reviews, and Ravelry, and, and, and...And that's why I get irritated when people deride Facebook. It is a whole network of people sharing things. I want to see a picture of a baby, and of the hat my friend has crocheted, and the pie someone else has baked, and I want to post the sketch I did today, because I think that we are all in relationship with each other, and sharing these things strengthens the relationships, even makes the relationships, to some extent. I have a suspicion deep down inside that Samuel Beckett, just to pluck Beckett out for special mention, wasn't as miserable as he made out, because I would imagine that real misery - or at least Ebenezer Scrooge paucity of spirit - stops you from writing plays or drawing carrots or composing a song. There is an iota of hope in the knitting of a mitten.
