Welcome to Making Time. Helping you find more joy in simple, everyday pleasures. I write about seasonal eating, making things, building a garden, and a slow life in rural Oregon. If you’d like to follow along, you can subscribe for free.
Back in May, I took my mom to Paris.
She was turning 74, and I’d just turned in a substantial creative project I’d been working on for the better part of a year. So these were our excuses to celebrate.
We rented an apartment overlooking a park in a quiet neighborhood, and would start each day with slow, lazy mornings of coffee, fruit, and fresh pastries from the nearby boulangerie. We’d sit on the balcony and just read, journal, and sketch each morning.
When I was about 13, my mom gave me drawing lessons. She taught me how to see perspective, how to sketch facial proportions, how to visually analyze a scene. I’d show her my work, and she’d say, “Isn’t it wonderful? It really gives you a whole new way to see.”
At 13, you’re starting to get messages about what you ought to do with your life. Most well-meaning adults try to impress upon you that you need to start building a secure future by getting good grades and developing some marketable skills. Art can be a fun hobby, but it’s dangerous to take it too seriously. It’s not a career.
Amid all these adult voices, I had my mom. She believed that creativity was essential, and that thinking only of career and security was an impoverished way of looking at the world. It is just as important to learn to see in different ways, so that you can make sense of yourself and the world around you.
I don’t think this is something she was consciously trying to impart; she was simply teaching me to draw. But the lessons changed the course of the rest of my life.
One morning in Paris, I sat at the little metal balcony table in the sun and read. In her spiral notebook, she drew a quick sketch of me with a pen on lined paper. She loves to draw portraits.
Impressed, I said, “Drawing with a pen seems hard. I don’t think I’m confident enough to do it.”
“Why’s that?” she asked.
“I feel like I won’t be able to get the proportions right. I have to start with a pencil sketch so I can get the proportions correct.” My drawing skills are a bit rusty, and I couldn’t imagine doing it without an eraser nearby.
“Sometimes proportions don’t matter,” she said. “Sometimes it’s just about the quality of the line.”
Since then, I’ve been drawing with pen and ink almost every morning. I put together a little sketching kit to take with me, with my favorite Copic pen and a few other tools in a little leather pencil case I bought at Charvin in Paris. I bought a dip pen and some nibs, and little pots of ink. I tried out some brush pens and a fountain pen. I’ve even started adding watercolor.
And she is right. I’d been so focused on drawing well, on not making mistakes, on capturing something objective, that I missed the opportunity to capture something even more meaningful: the actual experience of drawing. The sense of an instrument in a real human hand, guided by a unique human eye.
How often do I avoid the full experience of a messy, complex, human life in order to keep from making a mistake? Aren’t I always anxiously laying down hesitant marks, trying to make things just so and agonizing around shortcomings, instead of diving whole-heartedly into the experience of life?
Isn’t it sometimes easier to work really hard to do things “right”, instead of truly investigating the deeper truth?
Since I returned from that magical trip, I’ve been drawing with ink just about every day, usually with my morning coffee. I often get so consumed by the experience that I have to force myself to get up and do the normal adult things: take a shower, eat, start work.
I’ve also been bringing my sketchbook with me everywhere, doodling whenever I’m free for a minute instead of pulling out my phone and looking for a distraction.
A world has opened up to me, a world I first glimpsed at 13 when I started drawing. It’s a world in which there is no right way, no wrong way. Just different ways of seeing.
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Thank you for sharing this writing. It's inspiring and fascinating to read how your mother approaches her drawing... and how you broke through the perfection barrier. I plan on using her wisdom (and yours) in my creative practice.
I love your writing.❤️