~ ONE JOURNEY ~

~ There is only one journey: going inside yourself. ~
- Rainer Maria Rilke

Sketching and Syriana ~ Saturday, January 06, 2007

I took a class in sketching today. It was neat. It once more showed me that I am not necessarily gifted with the patience and devotion to the craft that would be required for me to get somewhere with it. It underscored that it really is just developing that skill--learning to eyeball distances and perspectives and to measure them in meaningful ways that will serve as useful shortcuts for transposing life into image. I suspect I will still dabble. I did realise that if I applied myself I would, at least, be not too bad and possibly even pretty good at it. Perhaps not an innovator, but technically proficient and able to do a few decent piece to hang on my wall.

But, I also realised that at this point, I'm not willing to commit the time that I'd need to developing that skill. I'll try for five-ten mins per day, for a slow progression, but that may be it for the nonce. It did, as I otherwise hoped it would, further add to my respect for those who are accomplished with such things--and underscored that the reason someone like Carrie Greber can toss off a saleable canvas in a day or so is because she spent years working on colour, line and image. Years, developing her eye and her sense for how one shade of colour blends into another. It always seems so effortless and therefore so inaccessible to me as a skill, and so today for probably the first time, I could see the stretch of work and self-application required to reach the stage of apparent effortlessness. I might even be able to get to that point, but it would take a while.

Not that I hadn't been aware that this was the case--just as my ability to formulate sentences or write a short story in a day (or several hours) isn't a skill that has been just as diligently acquired from years of work. I know that. But today, for the first time, I saw that I might actually have the potential to get there, if I'm willing to commit a stretch of hours comparable to what I spend with the writing stuff. And honestly, I cannot imagine having as much fun with the drawing (it's hypnotic to be sure, but feels limited to me) as I do with the writing. Ergo, until I start thinking about it in a different way, writing will be my primary commitment of that sort and drawing a very very distant second.

We also saw Syriana today.

It was kind of neat; kind of confusing. It wasn't a big revelation to me and I thought it could have been more clearly and suspensefully done. Ultimately I liked it, but didn't love it. It's not like unmasking the corrupting was some deep insight, but I did like that there was no one specific villian of the piece, and most people were shown to be acting in what they felt was a reasonable way, in the context if his situation. It wasn't one of those "heh heh heh, what evil can I wreak today? I know! I'll scapegoat some lackey as a sleight of hand gesture in order to consolidate my big business and lotsa money position--and just cause it's a rotten thing to do." Each of the characters really did feel he was the hero of his own story and we saw them walk that tightrope of moral compromise (or even fall off) all the while believe that he did so for a bigger, better cause (family, country etc.). Nice to see that balance without any kind of attendant glorification.
::Posted by Anduril Elessar @ 9:28 PM::::
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