carole cluer

Yesterday I started my first ‘proper’ drawing since my degree show.

My summer had been filled with making photograms for a couple of exhibitions and so I hadn’t really drawn for a couple of months. Okay I had been to life drawing and doodled a little bit but not really drawn. My drawings can take a long time, somewhere along the process  I always forget to record how long but about fifty plus hours, that’s a long time to spend on something that you might be disappointed with.

I have been deciding on the subject and pose for a few weeks now, looking at photos, choosing and discarding but now that I have started my MA I felt I had to commit to actually doing something.

Yesterday was the day of reckoning, I got up early and taped my paper to the board … then I took it down, it didn’t look right.  I lined my board … and took it down, it was creased. By midday I was ready to go, no, I needed to recheck my plans for another hour before I placed my pencil on the paper and made my first mark.

Why do I find a blank piece of paper so scary?

Its because I know that my work will never be as perfect as it is the moment before I actually start. In my imagination I draw with a talent that I can never replicate in reality.

I think a lot of us are afraid of failure and it can sometimes feel safer to find excuses to not try rather than risk discovering that we just aren’t good enough, but you know if we do that we will never discover that we are good enough.

It took me a long time to try at what I really wanted to do with my life, to believe I was worth the effort of trying, I am not sure yet if I have succeeded.

But you know, just like with my drawing, I can always try again.