Bits and bytes are bummers

Every so often...well, not every HOUR....but often....I have to assure myself that I am not the world's worst artist. I am assuming most of us have those feelings of wormhood every so often, often being a relative term.

Anyway, I spent two hours yesterday and two today on one of my remaining journalism cash cows, with the result that I swore loudly at technology and wanted desperately to kick the computer across the room and pick up a paintbrush...but didn't. It's a topsy-turvy day, though. I want to go for a walk; sun, in Cornwall lately, is particularly prized. And there's a life-drawing session tonight, and I happen to know one of my favorite models (who is also a friend) will be the model this evening. Which means that I have yet another chance to get his face wrong.

Mind you, he's a good-looking man, a pleasure to draw in many ways. But...and this is the really tough part...his face literally changes according to what he's thinking. And he's very smart. He's always thinking, and as a Scot, he enjoys that Celtic lateral thinking modality, letting the dots connect and following them happily wherever they lead. Bloody impossible to get THE ultimate likeness. But I'll keep trying. Happily.

Alex, focused (c. McBride 2012)

I'll struggle a lot more happily tilting at the windmills of Alex's up planes and down planes and implied motion and negative spaces and positive spaces than I would monkeying with bits and bytes and other digital garbage, and even with the words I'm cramming into the bits and bytes. I found, during this morning's misery with writing, that I have made a shift. I used to write--even journalism, really--with the right side of my brain. It just flowed. Now it's torture. I'm assuming I'm attempting to make the connections with the left side of my brain, like an accountant for crying out loud, and it just isn't working. But I'm reserving the right side, I think, for the shift to art, which cannot be done on the left side. Cannot. Period.

I loved Betty Edwards' Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. I might have a copy of that book around someplace. I might read it before I write something serious again. Or not. I think the right side of my brain will have to become a sort of inviolable temple, dedicated only to art, and to getting Alex finally--someday--perfectly RIGHT.  I'm not getting any younger, after all.