It's about why we do it, and why we do it is because we just can't help it.
My mentor told me that artists are people who make things.
If you don't make things, he said, then that's not who you are.
The last decade of Picasso's life, wherever else you think of him, at that point he's
not in it for the money, or the fame, or the women, or anything else.
And he completed at least one work of art every day of the last 10 years.
Every day he was sick, every birthday, every Christmas, every travel day, he completed at
least one work of art.
I think it's like what Pete said, it's what you do.
I go with Pete, you can't help yourself, it's what we do, it's missing every day if
you don't.
You have to draw every day, I have to anyway.
People who don't draw often think that when they look at a work of art that it happened
all at once, what was on the surface just magically appeared, those kid's things where
you put water on something and the image shows up all at once, but it's, in my experience,
it's more process oriented, it's more of a process, and the end result is just where
you decide to stop, and the actual process is much more, or as important as what you
end up with.
I've sat and watched people paint for eight hours and never got bored, you know, just
watching them go through that meditation and then creating something, and it becomes like
a drug, you know, I equate it to being a long distance runner.
The people who do a lot of drawing, who do hours and hours and hours of drawing, you
just get good at doing that 25 mile run.
All this means to me is the same thing that it meant to Leonardo da Vinci.
I saw 600 drawings at the Met and I realized why I did this every day or bring my sketchbook
with me to work or, you know, sketch my lunch or during my class, and it's because he explored
all the things that he was interested in life, I mean, because he left many more things on
paper than he ever left paintings.
One more thought I had, because the whole thing started about sketchbooks and drawing
clubbing, I'm a little drifty, so I have like two or three going at once, you know, because
I don't know where they are, and so hanging up the show the next day or that night, I
realized if you nail them all to the gallery wall, you don't have one.
So it's been kind of an awkward thing, like, oh, the drawing shows up and now I can't draw.
So yeah, so it's a little bit of planning, don't put them all up.
Why don't you take one down and get your work done?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
