life drawing

got some done in between talking about J@p@nese pen!s c@kes and taro for some strange reason. Ha! The model was talking about how she saw this one professor whose work I love go from stick figures to where he is today. She said it was in a short time (he obviously had some talent and worked incredibly hard), but that he did a lot of drawings and was in a lot of workshops. A friend of mine who recently moved to NYC (and a lot of people liked his work) was the same; a lot of the models said he was the kid who attended every drawing workshop. It's funny; my prof says the same "the better your l!fe drawing gets, the better EVERYTHING gets. Not like it's boring or anything..it's actually a LOT of fun with good company and the great thing is (which you don't get sitting at your desk doing master copies) you get to SEE other people's PROCESS. If you like what they do, you can even strategically plan to sit next to them and watch them stroke by stroke (discreetly, of course :) It's a wonderful thing to be able to do and quite a shame that people forego that kind of learning in favour of downloading and copying from the internet. To be able to learn a bit from 20 or thirty people at each session is incredible, especially in an era where people seem to become obsessed with an artist's style and idolize their mentors and proceed to set goals that involve wholesale blandly copying another person's style in the hope that they would achieve the success (or the admiration) of that person. I will say that I have no desire to be anyone but myself. I like a lot of different artists, and I think that certain stuff is 'cool', but usually I get over it because life is too short to be spent wanting to be a clone of someone else (at least in my opinion). I didn't choose to learn an artistic medium to become a living, breathing c@mer@ obscur@. When I attended the recent P*pperd!ne exhibit, I remember standing in such awe of this P@rr!sh painting. I had seen the image a MILLION times; in photos, on the internet, in books. But looking at it in the flesh was a completely DIFFERENT experience that was just another level. There was this immediacy and the colours sung in harmony in a way I had NEVER seen captured via an image photographically or otherwise. I had a similar experience with Terpn!ng's work. It's incredible. Enough rambling...back to work...