This new piece evolved from a large charcoal sketch drawn during a life drawing class to this layered exploration of our interconnectedness with the world. My fascination with our relationship with billions of microbial fellow travelers was a huge influence! Again, I highly recommend the book, I Contain Multitudes by Ed Yong.
Doing a more figurative piece is a new stretch for me. I’d welcome some feedback!
For more details on this piece, look here.
This fall in order to try to stretch my creative chops, I took a semester long Life Drawing class. The last time I did this was a hundred years ago in college and it took some time to get used to the messiness and loveliness of working with charcoal again. Each week we had a different model, all shapes and sizes and drew for over 2 hours.
I loved it. I’d leave each class covered in charcoal dust. I do think it was helpful for me to do something away from fabric and get back to looking and drawing again.
I have some ideas brewing on how to integrate elements of these drawings into my next fiber piece…we’ll see.
I’ve been trying to start each morning with reading a few pages from a terrific book by Danny Gregory (Everyday Matters) called The Creative License and making a daily sketch.
metal garden sculpture made by my amazing daughter-in-law, Bennett
I usually bristle at books like this but Gregory writes with a lovely light encouraging tone that I have found just what I needed to push me to sketch more. The trick for me was to frame it as keeping a sketch journal-daily quick sketches/collages/whatever that are created by really focusing in on whatever happens to be at hand.
my reading glasses
This helps me break the feeling of frozen incompetance that can hit me when faced with a blank page. Though these sketches will not directly show up in my fiber art, I know this process is doing some deep down magic that loosens up my creative juices. It all springs from the same well…
Karen Kamenetzky Fiber Art 