drawings

“Looking-Drawing”, small ink drawings before 2009 until June 2019

It was Saturday June 1st 2019, around noon, as I put some boxes with old newspapers outside along the sidewalk, to be collected to raise money to finance the organization of local village activities.

It was just a few days later as I realised one of those boxes had contained almost all of my ‘one-drawing-per-day’ drawings: small drawings of insects and fallen leaves etc., mostly in pen and Chinese inkt, partly with a simple HB-pencil and that I had made since the end of 2009, some of those drawings were older, going back to 1990 or even earlier.

These drawings were done with a technique, or maybe it is better to say ‘mind‘, that I call “Looking-Drawing”. It is a mindset that I had partly derived from what I knew and learned about Zen Buddhism in the late 1980’s and that had resulted in a change in my artwork, in my attention to the object that I was drawing: attention, attention, attention! And that again resulted in the exhibition “Ten Times Breathing to Become this Bat” at “It Bleekerhûs Museum”, Drachten, NL (nowadays called Museum Dr888 or Museum Drachten).

The most important result of “Looking-Drawing” is an increasing capacity of attention, to have some ‘insight’ in what is been drawn or maybe, as it were, ‘to become or ‘to be‘ what is been drawn. Attention is something that can be getting deeper by repetition, by making a second or a third drawing of the same object just after the one before. The drawing itself is no more than a repercussion from the depth of the attentiveness, being a mirror not only for the object but also for the draftsman, in both a physical as in a mental way, not only in general, but it is to be pinned at just one single moment.

But OK…., they were/are drawings! And one may call them artworks too… Some of them are more interesting than others and you may also talk about a feeling of compostion still… So yes, I guess there may be a kind of attraction between the viewer to the drawings. And now I had lost them….

However, I couldn’t take up the one-drawing-per-day-habit anymore. Was it frustration or resignation? Or was it just the right moment to stop, or maybe beyond that moment and this was the way the Cosmos had been telling me? Who knows….

Few of these drawings were saved, because they were framed for an exhibition in the summer of 2010. That is why they were stored away elsewhere, in another box… Luckily….

Sketches at the school

Besides being a draftsman and a painter I was an art teacher at a secondary school, with pupils 12 to 18. As I was surveilling during testing periods, I often made sketches while the pupils made their tests. Most of the time I used a fineliner pen on regular drawing paper, often measuring about 25×16 cm.

Other drawings

Drawings is an almost daily activity. Sometimes it’s no more then a small survey, a sketch, other times it becomes a real drawing of its own. It can be made with a simple pencil or with a fineliner or pen-and-ink. With chalk or with a brush. Often in blacks or greys, but also with color. All kind of themes come along, everything can be drawn.

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