Learning from Painting, Part 7: Finding Inspiration, Six Years Later
In 2019, I started painting and drawing on my iPad frequently, especially during a month-long sabbatical in Europe, in which I often spent many hours just drawing. When I got home, I wrote a series of blog posts reflecting on those experiences. Those experiences—and the reflections from them in my blog—has driven my research since then.
Over the years, my motivation to keep drawing has waxed and waned, for various reasons. I feel like I “should” keep drawing, but often lack the drive.
I’ve recently finished another month-long sabbatical, including a lot of time traveling and Europe, where I again spent many hours drawing each day.
So here’s Part 7 in the series: finding inspiration, six years later.
Still at it
I’ve never knew if I would keep drawing and painting. A lot of the ebbs and flows of whether or not I keep drawing depends on how excited or inspired I am around things, and that’s varied a lot.
When I first picked up the stylus in 2019, I thought it was really fun. I didn’t pursue it immediately, other than a few idle sketches in an airport:
Then, on the first day of my 2019 sabbatical, I did some sketching and found it so rewarding that I made it a conscious plan to put a lot of my sabbatical time into drawing and painting, and kept at it for the whole month.
I thought that maybe I’d lose interest when I got back home. I didn’t. The first morning when I got home I took a photo on my morning walk and immediately went and painted a picture from it. My experiences and compululsions to paint and draw had come home with me, and coming home had provided a whole new set of things to try drawing with my new skills in tow.
Drawing has to feel a bit new each time, or I lose interest; I don’t want to feel like I’m doing something too predictable, or too similar to something I’ve done before. Nor do I want to try things that are too difficult. The longer I spent around my neighborhood, the harder it came to find inspiration, especially during the 2020 pandemic lockdowns. At first, while stuck at home, I drew still-lives of things around my house:
and the sights while having drinks with friends in the parks or on our patios
In December 2020, I went on a hike with friends, on the eve of a new lockdown mandating that we not see other people for awhile, and I drew this sketch of the SF skyline, just using my finger on my phone:
But, after enough drawings of still lives, hikes, patio dinners, and a few other common themes, I ran low on inspiration at home and did not draw much; even the sights on our regular city hikes became too familiar.
After vaccination,
I started traveling again, which offered even more new sources of inspiration for a few years.
By 2023, however, I felt the inspiration ebb, until I started volunteering at an animal shelter, and found new motivation in drawing and sharing pictures of the dogs I worked with:
(Here’s a book I made of last year’s dog drawings; perhaps it deserves its own blog post.) The dog pictures are always drawn from photos. And, while drawing from life is important to me, I find drawing from photos to be useful too, as in the vaccination photo above. Animals don’t sit still for portraits.
But after over a year of drawing shelter dogs, I’ve lost momentum there too.
Sketching beverages has somehow kept my interest, especially my morning espresso, especially while traveling. It’s become a warm-up for days when I’m drawing a lot; it’s in a “sweet spot” of being visually interesting (to me), but not extremely complicated. Lots of complexity that can be drawn but needn’t be.
On my recent sabbatical, I thought it would be interesting to go back and draw pictures at places in Oxford where I’d had some memorable drawing experiences in my first sabbatical. But when I got to them I never found much desire to try drawing them again.
Reflections
Finding the excitment, inspiration, and space to draw is a continual challenge. It’s partly the sense that there’s something interesting about trying to draw this thing: it’s not too “easy” for me, or too difficult, but enough of a stretch. Even when I have the time, it’s sometimes a tough decision whether to start—if I start on this, will it work out? Will it be better than something else I might find to draw instead, or doing something else, like, say, going for a walk or reading a book?
Over the years, these experiences with drawing have been a bit of a positive spiral: going around in circles revisiting familiar subjects, only after I’d learned something from the previous iteration. But it only seems that way in retrospect; in the moment, it often feels like a difficult search for motivation, inspiration, and something worthwhile. I’ve left out of a lot of false starts and disappointing drawings from these pages.
My painting experiences in 2019 were amazing, full of new discoveries, and this current one has been more incremental. This fits my experience in learning other skills: you start out learning a lot quickly and being very excited, and then the pace slows as learning deepens.
A big factor are the responses from friends and acquaintances. Friends were very supportive of my initial scribblings; without which I might have stopped, or might have stopped at several times along the way. I still maintain that art is a fundamentally a social phenomenon. When drawing dogs, positive feedback from that community and the sense of connection keeps me going, as well as wanting to spend more time with the pictures of the dogs themselves. Positive feedback from acquaintaces and colleagues helps too, and I do notice it, and it doesn’t all have to come from one place. For example, I’ve noticed that I’m not getting many “likes” on social media, and, then, at conferences, colleagues tell me that they love my drawings on social media even if I’ve never seen them once “like” my posts. If all of these sources of feedback dwindled, then maybe I’d stop. I’m continually grateful to everyone who offers support.
My best new experience on this sabbatical came from drawing longer, larger pictures. In Fall 2019, I tried making one very-involved, large scale painting. I sketched it on-site and then painted in details over many hours, using a photographic reference. I was ultimately disappointed in how it came out.
One day of my sabbatical this year, I’d spent the day wandering around, working in cafes and sketching in plazas. Later in the day, I wandered into a cathedral, and, after exploring the place, sat down to begin a big drawing. The place was peaceful, with choral music lightly playing in the background; not too many people around, and no feeling of pressure to get things done quickly. Most of my drawings are relatively quick sketches, but I ended up spending 70 minutes working on this one:
I was very happy with it. When I walked out of the church, I felt serene.