Happy New Year Everyone!
All being well, 2015 will be a year where I will make more time for art. I want to sketch more, paint more, design more and create more. I also want to connect more, hence I’ve set up this blog as part of my website.
To get my finger out get me in the mood, I pledged to myself that I would to draw something every day – draw anything, from a 30 second doodle to a painting. Of course, it never hurts to get more drawing and painting practice in, but this is really more about time, more importantly – making time… Making time to stop. Making time to look. Making time to see. Making time to think. Making time to appreciate the important things in life.
2014 went by in a flash, as did several previous years, and this year I am determined to take more time to stop. Maybe we should all take more time to stop. The world moves faster every year, and as we become frantic in our efforts to keep up with the pace of commerce, technology, the latest ‘must have’ and even the Jones’s – in trying to gain more we miss a lot.
Art is a great means in which to relax, either by making or appreciating. Gazing at pictures should transport you somewhere, it should lift you from consciousness into the picture and let you leave the world behind for a few moments. Art has a calming effect, I’ve never felt angry looking at a picture I like, and maybe that is because it makes me stop.
New Year’s day was a busy one for various reasons and I almost forgot my resolution on the first day, so grabbing a graphite stick (a sort of a thick pencil lead without the wood), I took a few moments and sketched the nearest thing to me. OK, it’s a sketch of an every day object (so my wife tells me), and a fairly boring subject at that, but any time I look at that picture from now on, hopefully it will remind me to stop. To me, that gives this simple little sketch a truly big meaning.
