Oh My Goodness- A Freakin' Picture! That Means You Got Homework

My Goddess! Blogger has gotten over its brain fart! I'm almost at a loss for words. But that's okay 'cause I got pictures now!

So! I said I wanted to draw. I suck at it. I really wanted to take Drawing I in college but every other student on campus did too, so the classes, all 15 of them, would be full every time I tried to register. Of course, I could not take Drawing II because I had not taken I. This led me to a class called Art Appreciation. I have taken many a class during my academic career. Most of them are not worth mentioning. A lot of them were just ways for the school to charge tuition and those classes had little to do with anything. But I loved Art Appreciation and I wish all my classes could have been taught by teachers who not only knew the subject matter, but lived it. My instructor was an artist. A real artist with a studio who spent a great deal of time painting and then sold his paintings. Obviously he didn't make a steady living at art or he wouldn't need his teaching job, but he understood the balance between wanting to create what he liked and needing to create what would sell. He was interested in all kinds of art and he seemed to think experience was the best teacher because we spend half the class creating our own art.

We sketched (I never finished one, I am way too slow), we made collages (okay at that), we made prints (cool, but too time consuming for me), we painted (!), and our last project was working with clay (loved, reminded me of my Grandfather's ceramic shop, but also too time consuming for me). I learned more about art in that one quarter than I had learned in my whole uncultured life. I still have the textbook from the class. I bought it used. There are notes, mine and other students, highlighted passages, and dog-eared pages. And I nearly have the whole book memorized.

I became familiar with a lot of art. I learned styles, periods, history, painting, sculpture, fine art, graphic designs, photography, quilts (OMG! Fiber art BEFORE it was popular!), wood carving, printing, crafts...I just can't name all the things I had to learn. I learned how people react to art, why some art is censored, and why some art is great while other is considered trash.

And the whole reason I learned what art moves my emotions, is because I still, to this day, study every picture I see.

I like this picture. I like dragons. I like purples and blues. I like books and moons and night and magic. So I like the subject, I like the colors, and I like the placement- the dragon has interrupted the reader, interrupted the alchemy. Why? Is he uninvited? Is the dragon a symbol of danger, of forbidden power, of calling what you can't put down? Is he teaching, pointing to the much needed paragraph? Is the window behind the dragon symbolizing opportunity and moving beyond set limits? Must we face our fears before we can soar to great heights? Is that why the dragon has wings? Is he not flying because we have been doing too much thinking and not enough doing?

I could go on and on. I could write essays on just this one picture. Actually, that's what I'm doing.

I've embarked on an art journey. I am studying the pictures I have, from Pinterest, from forwarded emails, from photos I've taken, and I am trying to figure out why I love these things. What speaks to me? These are the things I should be drawing. These are the colors I should stitch.

You photograph what you fear losing. Think about it.