Regular readers of this blog will know just how much I appreciate art in all forms and mediums. I’m fortunate to be able to call myself a published author and singer-songwriter, and while I may be partial to these art forms I’ve practised for years, once in a while I feel the need to branch out and explore others.
In this vein, I’ve spent the last few days filling a new sketchbook with drawings. I’ve drawn house plants, I’ve drawn woodland trees, I’ve drawn pencil figures of people walking their dogs, and I’ve drawn geometrically stylised people drinking coffee. While I’ve enjoyed every bit of it, I’ll be the first to admit I’ve been doing all this quite badly, which makes it even more enjoyable.
I say this because although I’ve had a stressful few days, one of the things that has gotten me through is dabbling in the visual arts as a complete and utter novice. I have no training as a visual artist, no significant experience with drawing or sketching or painting to fall back on, and perhaps more importantly, no stakes whatsoever. By virtue of this, I’ve been able to approach each new page of my sketchbook with the lowest possible expectations, knowing that the result is unlikely to be noteworthy. This has freed me from the pressure I would otherwise have felt in any other position, apart from that of the novice or beginner.
In one of the very first posts I published when I started this blog, I wrote about how the pressure of doing something new – and our tendency to fixate on the potential results – could paralyse us from doing it in the first place. I followed up that post a while later with another about how we could relieve ourselves of this pressure by permitting ourselves to do the thing badly, thus turning conventional wisdom on its head. Through this lens, I’d like to share a couple of the sketches I’ve drawn this week.
Maybe I’ll even share more of these sketches on this blog, in keeping with Austin Kleon’s philosophy of showing your work. For now, if I may, I’d like to leave you with an encouragement to find something you enjoy doing, perhaps something you’ve always wanted to do, and feel free to do the thing, badly. If you do, you just might experience the joys of being a novice.
P.S.: My debut non-fiction book, Art Is The Way, and my middle-grade novella, A Hollade Christmas, are out everywhere now. You can get them in all good bookstores and from all major online vendors.