Drawings

I tried a couple of drawing classes in my late teens, but found I had no gift for copying “reality.” When I studied Japanese culture in freshman year at Michigan, I thought it would be wonderful to do ink drawing someday, but never got to it. The first person to encourage me to develop drawing as a late-life hobby was the artist Jacqueline Gourevitch, whose work I have always found visually inspiring, but I wasn’t sure which medium or approach would work for me. When I moved to NY towards retirement in 2015, I mentioned this to my dear friend Max Gimblett, an artist deeply integrated into the world of Zen and ink drawing, alongside his painting. Max handed me a huge, lovely brush and said “just do it.” So I started, completely intuitively. I simply put down an unconsidered gesture on paper and then thought about its implications, adding something that then created a new context to start from. Sometimes I went too far, sometimes I stopped quickly. Having no particular investment in my success, I just found this an absorbing hobby- nothing like going into a state of flow and building new neural pathways, as they say these days. I ran some drawings by Max who told me I had my own style and was now an artist, which totally surprised me.

So as an exercise, I made a little booklet of drawings entitled “Inkmarks” (get the pun?), just giving it to a few of my closest people, and kept on drawing. I also wrote an essay reflecting on the work. It’s been a gift in my mid-70s to have a new pastime in my little New York studio.