A Small Group of Mostly Affable Circles

Blind Drawings

The first time I made a blind drawing was in 9th grade art class. Sadly, I didn't like my art teacher very much. She was not the nurturing type, I feared my lack of success, but I did know how much I wanted to learn the magic of how to draw and how to paint and how to live surrounded by all those luscious colors. Regretfully, making blind drawings the second day of her class did not do the trick for me. Instead, drawing like this, along with her lack of support, fed my fragile insecurity and belief that I simply could not draw.

The second time I made blind drawings was twenty years later when I promised myself that I really was going to stop this nonsense and learn how to draw. Enough of this yearning to do something so important to me. And so, with Betty Edwards' "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain" in hand, I dove in. Within two weeks I was drawing. I mean, I was DRAWING ! No more "Oh poor me, I can't draw," I was actually seeing in a way that enabled me to draw. Yes, it was the SEEING part of this that I was never taught, nor realized myself. How my life changed. Now not only could I draw what I saw, but I could find joy in those alluring blind drawings that I was once again asked to draw at the beginning of Edwards' book. This time they certainly had the opposite effect on me that they had in my disappointing teenage art class. So to you, Betty Edwards, I am eternally grateful.

Having had such disparate experiences with this odd kind of drawing, I was thrilled when my dear friend and wondrously talented artist Susan Pasquarelli started making blind self-portraits with her left hand, no less, when she was forced to give her dominant hand a rest. I was enchanted and mystified by her ability to make these portraits with such aplomb and success, and I was completely captivated by the drawings themselves. Here were drawings that seemed to come from deep within her depths of soul and fantasy and dreams. Some had an ancient quality to them, others looked like drawings of a child prodigy. I was hooked. I knew that I wanted to explore this world, too, and it was then that the seeds of this book were sown.

Girlfriends

I have been very fortunate to have had many girlfriends in my life. Along with my family, girlfriends have been by far my closest friends, my touch stones, my confidants and cohorts, and an absolute necessity to my well-being, especially when my being hasn't been that well. These friendships feed me and support me in ways no other relationships can. They keep me grounded and keep my take on reality in check. It is not surprising that I have lived in only one place in my life where I did not have a gaggle of girlfriends to be with, talk to and play with, and that place I left after two years. I have learned in a not-so-subtle way, no girlfriends, no me.

Mind you, I am not blind or oblivious to the layers of such friendships. Many times my heart has been broken when a relationship with a favorite girlfriend has gone sour. From childhood tiffs to adult unexplained coldness, these rifts have cut my heart as deeply as the pain of breaking up with a special boyfriend. But they have never deterred me from welcoming, anew, a special friendship of depth and trust and wisdom when a new magnificent woman enters my life.

This Book

Among my many girlfriends, I have a close group of women with whom I often share "art days." Naturally, it became just a matter of time before I instigated a blind drawing day to see what would happen and how hard we could laugh. It finally happened one Mother's Day weekend when we closed our eyes and made these drawings of ourselves and then of each other. Some friends wrapped their eyes with scarves so that they would not cheat, and these pieces of fabric became surprisingly wonderful shapes in our final drawings. Suffice it to say, we did laugh-until-we-cried.

The next morning I awoke to find that everyone's colored pencils, crayons and markers were out and had transformed the drawings into something very different from those made the night before. What were once crazy-wonderful line drawings had now become crazier colored stories told, abstracts hidden and layered images of depth or silliness. And yes, the drawings were colored with all eyes open, even that elusive third one.

There were three of us, however, who did not color our drawings. I am very glad for this because I do love the purity of the blindness. I must admit that I was a bit taken aback when I woke up to so many colored images; I hadn't ever thought of this happening. But with all of our imaginations in overdrive, what's a girl to do but go with it and be thankful for the treasures that appeared.

Over a year later, as I began to write about these drawings with this book in mind, one of these friends suggested that we write about our drawings in a "spontaneous" way. We weren't to ponder, we were to react and write our first thoughts. By then, most of us had forgotten what we had drawn so it was easy for us to write about the images not knowing who they were supposed to be. It was here that the writings were born which are next to some of the drawings in this book. With these, adding yet another layer of our "getting out of the way," the seeds of this book sprouted more growth and laughter than I ever could have dreamed of way back in 9th grade art class.

ARJ August 2015