Drawing, Painting
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It was July 2003. I had been playing with drawing for many years, and I had started trying using watercolors for a couple of months. I had an idea of the potential richness hidden in these pictorial activities, but couldn't really see them. Too much struggling for trying to get results similar - but worse - than examples I was seeing around. Then, a fortuitous chance. I wanted to attend to a painting course during my vacations. I found an interesting watercolor course in Venice, but it was unfortunately fully booked. Alternatively, they had a "open-air-drawing-course". This was not what I wanted to have, but I accepted anyway. Just two days before leaving, I found in a bookshop the book "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain" (by Betty Edwards), the subject was in line with the new subject of my coming vacations, the title looked interesting (I have read a lot about hypnosis in the past, and the idea left/right side of the brain comes from the same environment) and I bought it. I was captured. I did some of the proposed exercises. Copying a drawing upside down. Copy without knowing what you are copying, just copying the abstract pattern of lines that appears in front of you... Astonished, I was seeing the pencil moving on the paper. I couldn't believe that these were my hands, that these signs, so different from anything I had traced on paper before, were generated by me. I was both spectator and actor. My hands drawing what my eyes were looking at, I saw the subjects I had in front of me entering my eyes, passing through the deepest part of myself and getting out through my hands, leaving on paper a visible mark of what I am. It was not just a drawing exercise. This was telling me about me. I was looking at me. Deeply me. Beyond what I believed to be. No need to copy someone else's style, no need to be like others wanted me to be. I was just discovering the dance that me, exactly me, and the world are everyday dancing together, the world appearing to my eyes, me interpreting the world by doing something, and the world changing at my eyes because what I have done changes how the world looks to me & so on. From that moment on I have never stopped. I draw everything and everywhere, always with a small sketchbook in one pocket and my mini-watercolor-kit in another... Fabrizio |
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