I am filled with inspiration. There is more that I want to do than there is time for. And yet there is one part of me that lacks, like there is a disconnect between my head and what I actually produce– drawing.
I grew up drawing all the time. Mom made sure that Denise and I always had plenty of paper- the notepads my medical doctor grandfather received from drug companies and later piles of dot matrix computer paper Karen brought home from college– and markers and crayons. It seemed like almost yearly we received new markers for Christmas and after school ended in June, our leftover crayons ended up in one big bag, a bag I believe Karen still has.
In school, even as I grew older, I doodled a lot. Probably in suicide prevention meetings and my doctoral classes, too, but I don’t have the notes to prove that.
And yet now I find that even though I have good intentions about drawing, I easily push it aside for other things I feel I need to do. The disconnect seems to have more to do with what I allow myself to do in a day, that freedom not just to express myself, but to spend the time doing something that always made me deliriously happy.
One of my goals for this year to get over that hump especially since reading something that graphic artist Milton Glaser (who died a few months ago) said about how we have gotten away from our imaginations and we allow technology to be our creative outlet. I don’t want to color in someone else’s lines either, I want to color in within the ones I have drawn (if I even have lines on my page!).
Apparently, Glaser was known for sketching various aspects of life– landscapes, meals. It’s also a diary of sorts and one I hope that I can not just find the time to do this year, but make it a new way of documenting life and what inspires me.