Rhetoric Can't Raise the Dead: A New Year & A Drawing Lab

While New Year's Resolutions are beginning to lag or maybe even fizzling out mine is taking its joyous shape.

It's not secret that I've struggled a great deal since moving to Chicago fifteen months ago. It was sometime last February when I realized to my horror that I couldn't write anymore. Poetry: gone. Fiction: gone. Letters: gone. Personal journal: gone. I'd always thought of the fabled writer's block as having the desire to write but for some reason not being able to do so. This time writer's block was feeling the weight of stories in my heart and mind yet not being able to let them bleed out. Voices, echoes, moments from stories true and imagined crowded in. Once that would have meant writing them out and becoming empowered by them but this time I was crippled by them and felt unable to even face them.
I did several thing to try to drown out the stories or forget them, but at last in November I forced myself to write. That's the thing of it, there were so many stories floating through me that I'd pushed deeper and deeper until when at last I sat down to write I even said aloud, "I don't have a story to tell." I wrote anyway, just to prove to myself that I could. A strange thing happened then, I began to feel myself waking up. Suddenly the things I had brought into my life to help me ignore the nagging of the stories I couldn't release were obvious for the shackles they had always been. I left Chicago to visit family for the holidays in a way I didn't expect: excited. Excited to visit family, but also excited to return to Chicago in a new year and another chance to write.

This photo from the Amazon listing

While there are more quiet resolutions for myself about writing, I was given another new year's resolution as a Christmas gift. When my parents gave me Carla Sonheim's Drawing Lab for Mixed-Media Artists I doubt they meant it to be a goal for my new year, but 52 drawing exercises is just perfect to have one for each week of the year! As the cover might suggest, this is not a book for realistic renderings instead Sonheim says that her goal is to make drawing fun again. The book has seven units and the first is about finding inspiration from animals. Within each unit there are several "drawing labs" with instructions for a drawing exercise and tips for taking the drawing further.
In the first week of 2014 I eagerly started the first lab "Cats on a Bed." The exercise involves using your bed (or in my case a pillow) to make loose drawings of cats from memory and imagination. This was a lot of fun! It was even more fun because when I'd run out of poses that I could imagine a cat in I would turn to my husband and say,"What else do cats do?" and that darling man would describe or ever act out another cat pose. The "taking it further" for this lab was to select one or two favorite poses and render them in another media. Because I'm giving myself a week for each lab, and because I liked several poses I ended up doing several of the poses in watercolors. I included one page of my sketches and my watercolor cats below.
So far the hardest thing about this New Year's resolution has been to not do all the exercises in 52 days!