52 Fridays - Is It Magic? Or Is It Crap?

Happy Friday! Here is my third drawing of this “52 Fridays” drawing project. It is of a wooden figure of the Chimu African tribe from 1000-1470 AD. I worked from a photo found in a book called "Art of Oceania, Africa, and the Americas from The Museum of Primitive Art" that I found on The Metropolitan Museum of Art web site. They have made available over five hundred art books for free, as PDF files. It is a treasure trove for any art lover, so if you are looking to be inspired, pay them a visit and download a few (dozen) books. You will feel better, I promise you.

I choose this figure because I liked his shape and for the strong wood grain texture. There is also an "x-factor" there, something that I connected with that I can't articulate and don't want to spoil by thinking too much about it. 

I roughed out the basic shape in pencil and did the final drawing with a cheap, black Bic ballpoint pen. I like to draw, but always have to fight through the resistance of my critic and doubting mind to get to the fun part. That shitty voice is always telling me that whatever marks I am making are crap, that it's wrong, why am I bothering, and, of course, "you are a fraud". I've learned to fight through this, nodding my head and mentally agreeing in a patronizing way, "Yes, yes, you are right", but I continue on anyways. I always give myself an out that I don't have to show anyone if it really is that bad. I find drawing to be meditative and always, at some point, fall into a shallow trance and wake up when the the sketch is close to being done. That's when I often find that the marks I had so recently had no confidence in, now have magically become something. Mere marks now  have become wood or metal or bone and the the thing looks back at me. If I can get a little bit of my soul in there, then I have won. That is always a feeling worth the effort.

OK HW