My idea of heaven is quite basic. Requiring only a tatty old 3′x2′ wooden board from my childhood (the ‘drawing board’), a pile of clean, untouched paper, and a freshly sharpened pencil. The possibilities are endless. The very definition of a blank canvas. That’s my heaven.I’d liken the emotion of facing the aforementioned objects to the few minutes on Christmas mornings of my childhood, when my brothers and I had to wait (on pain of death) for our parents to wake up so we could go and see what Father Christmas had left for us. Our imaginations would be in overdrive. There could be anything under that tree. Whatever we imagined had a real chance of being there…
Once the door to the living room opened, and we got our grubby little hands on the presents, a different emotion, influenced by reality, and maybe a little more frenzied, would take over. With the reality of our Christmas morning having revealed itself, the imagined version faded into the ether. Our living room door being like the lid of a festive Schrodinger’s cat box.
Similarly, once the drawing process begins, a creative path has been taken, and, with every line drawn, the infinite possibilities of the resulting piece start to diminish.
I sometimes find myself wallowing in the potential of the blank canvas, often to the extent that I can lose hours to wistful daydreams of drawings as yet undrawn. The untouched paper contains every drawing I can think of until the nib of the pencil touches it.
I once took note of a signature beneath a forum user’s comment on Conceptart.org – a great source of artisitic inspiration. It was a quote from Orson Wells. It said “The enemy of art is the absence of limitations”.
This struck a chord with me.
Limitations? On Art? Surely limitations and art are two words that do not sit well together? Surely this is a direct attack on my enjoyable hobby of “sketching nothing”? Surely by restricting my creativity, I restrict my enjoyment?
Surely ACTUALLY putting pencil to paper instantly dilutes the endless possibilities held in the tip of my freshly-sharpened 2B?
Or maybe it’s just a different way of saying “Get your head out the clouds, Dave. You’ve got to start somewhere.”
