Catching up

Yesterday’s lesson 6 and the lesson 5 of the day before were posted together, unintentionally. I was writing on my phone and didn’t realise that the first hadn’t gone live.

The reason for this is that I’ve been away for a few days, taking Wink down to her old home because she’s booked in for her hip replacement on Wednesday. We are locked down again in Britain and can only travel at all for appropriate reasons. One is for medical appointments and another is to accompany someone to a medical appointment; so both of us were covered – even though it was 250 miles away. But we stayed in the car apart from buying petrol, when I paid at the pump, so we had no contact with anyone.

We didn’t actually stay at her old house, because it’s empty of furniture. Wink’s lovely friends Bob and Elizabeth have both died in the past four years and their house has been kept by their son, who lives in America but – in normal times – visits two or three times a year. Wink loved Bob and Elizabeth and spent a lot of time with them. They were old enough to be our parents but that’s irrelevant. Age and friendship do not have to relate to each other. Since the house has been empty, Wink has kept an eye on it, opened post and sent it on, etc and the son kindly has offered it for her to stay in whenever she wants to visit. So that’s where we’ve been.

She had a Covid test yesterday and is isolating until Wednesday, when a taxi will take her to the hospital. Since she’s not had a call, she is clear to go ahead. Another dear friend is having her to stay afterwards, because she won’t be able to travel for another week or two. Then I’ll go back down to pick her up and she can recuperate fully here. And, by the springtime, she’ll be fully recovered and good to go again.

Today’s drawing was a recollection of a childhood landscape drawing. Basically, a house in a garden. Whipped it off in a couple of minutes, with the observation that the only bit I remember having drawn is a chimney with smoke coming out. Meh. I trust there’s a point to it but never mind anyway, hardly worth uploading.

Lovely to be home with Tim again. And Eloise, of course.

2 comments on “Catching up

  1. Blue Witch

    Best wishes to Wink for tomorrow, and for a speedy recovery.

    Is that drawing course supposed to be for beginners? Good grief, the subject matter is so complicated and not at all what beginners are usually raised on! Humans and animals are probably the most difficult things to draw as we all think we ‘know’ what they should look like, which makes us much more defined in our efforts (as we look less, thinking we already ‘know’), and critical of our accomplishments.

    Reply
    1. Z Post author

      Thank you, BW. I’ll pass your message on.

      Drawing something upside-down is a lot more possible than copying a drawing, which is terribly difficult, for just the reason you say. Interestingly, the hardest part for me was a face because, even the wrong way up, I know what it’s supposed to look like. She wants to overcome the dominance of the left side of the brain, which is done by making it switch off because the job is too difficult. It’s all about seeing and perception – having had the book recommended, I’m giving it a go. Tim rather agrees with you, he thinks that it’s odd that I’m not starting with something simple. But if I couldn’t read, then a book with simple three letter words wouldn’t engage my interest, there would have to be a story that I wanted to read. “Given proper instruction, drawing is not very difficult. It almost seems that your brain already knows how to draw, You just don’t realize it,” she says. She is very understanding of what puts children off drawing; that they know what they want to do but not how to do it. I don’t know if I’ll make progress, but I’m going to trust her experience and try.

      Chapter 6 is Perceiving Edges. Eek.

      Reply

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