Been drawing a year now

I started drawing a year ago. Before I started no-one, including me, had any idea that I would take up drawing as a hobby and no-one, including me, had any thought that I might have any talent. I don't now claim to have talent but I do claim to be able to produce drawings of a higher quality than I or, I suspect, anyone else imagined a year ago.

My experience makes me agree totally with Betty Edwards. Drawing is not magic. It's a skill like any other and a mixture of enthusiasm, belief and application will enable anyone to draw pictures of at least a comparable standard to my own, probably better.

I have recently started reading Betty Edwards' book Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. I should have read it earlier - it was written for me a year ago. It starts with the assumption that anyone can draw competently if only they can temporarily escape some of the intellectual structures they have developed while growing up, and then it goes on to prove this. Some of what I am reading here I have already discovered for myself; more of it is a revelation like a light being switched on.

 I find the act of drawing an escape from the stress of my life. This isn't why I started doing it but it is a good part of why I continued through the early days. Betty Edwards describes this escape as switching from the left side of the brain to the right. The left side of the brain is the normally dominant language and logical side. When you're thinking, that's what you are using. The right side of the brain is the intuitive dreaming side of the brain. Switching into the right side of the brain by meditation, running, driving, skiing, drawing or that other thing produces a calming of the mind, perhaps a feeling of bliss. It is an escape, and it is a very valuable escape from a stressed lifestyle. It is what I was describing when I wrote about drawing 28 Liberty in Chains but I didn't understand it as well back then.

Spending a lot of time drawing people's faces has made me observe faces differently. I now see a great deal more in a face than I used to. I also see more in necks, shoulders, arms, elbows, hands, backs, legs, knees, calves and feet. I have a new fascination for the human body. (Titter ye not at the back.)

I see more in art now. A year ago I had little more than derision for Picasso and Warhol, Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin. I have since copied the art of two of these and have a new found respect for another of them. (I still think the remaining one is a fraud.) I had never heard of Durer or Seurat, now I can spend hours looking at their masterpieces and reflecting on the ideas I can steal from them. I always enjoyed visiting the National Gallery in London. Now the children can name and recognise artists and paintings there and have their own favourites. I still think the art in Tate Modern is pretentious and almost worthless by comparison.

I now have an answer to the questions  What is Art?  and What is Great Art?. You may not like them!