Sorry correct address is www.katewalters.co.uk/blog

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Kate Walters" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Sunday, January 13, 2013 5:43 PM
Subject: Re: Drawing and emotion


> Hi Everyone,
> My emotions feature strongly in my work, and they always have done. I 
> respond emotionally to the phenomena which appear in my watercolours, and 
> it is my hope that my work touches others emotionally too. I work from the 
> heart more than from an intellectual place. The intellect is employed when 
> I need to make certain formal decisions, but for me it is a conversation 
> between the emotional, the intellectual, the invisible - or unknown- and 
> the bodily or felt - as in physical sensations - which occur when I am 
> working. I always listen to music when I am working, which comes from a 
> strong emotional/passionate place e.g works by Schubert, Handel, Mozart, 
> Haydn; Amy Winehouse; or are so beautiful that they elicit an emotional 
> response from me e.g. Bach.
> The process of drawing (I use watercolour) for me is a heart-opening one 
> and it is exactly where I can access my most heartfelt emotions, and it is 
> the key for me to deep understanding and deep emotional insights, which 
> lead to the learning of lessons I need to learn/ spiritual truths I need 
> to see. Drawing for me is about showing my vulnerabilities, my soft 
> underbelly, where I am tender.
> For examples please see my blog
> http://www.katewalters.co.uk
>
> With best wishes,
> Kate Walters.
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: "Melvin Strawn" <[log in to unmask]>
> To: <[log in to unmask]>
> Sent: Sunday, January 13, 2013 3:07 PM
> Subject: Re: Drawing and emotion
>
>
>> Patty,
>>
>> The attached drawing was done in 1956.  I was in the U.S. army posted
>> at the field hospital on Koje island  that served the UN POW Camp #1.
>> My job was the night shift A&D clerk/offficer. The Chinese prisoner on
>> crutches was simply waiting to be admitted to hospital. I drew  him
>> out of interest, as a kind of documentation. I think his emotional
>> state was one  of numb resignation, almost neutral perhaps. He was
>> young  as was  I. I remember no heightened emotion... but is  interest
>> in noting, denoting, delineating not an implicit entering into a
>> shared reality? My attitude was to be honest in what I saw-and was a
>> part of. My feelings were not anger, not judgement, not consciously
>> stressed, down or up-but simply involved in a task of noting a human
>> condition and recognizing a fellow human being.  We were all numbed
>> by our (shared) imprisonment; jailers spend time in jail also...
>> I think one may be, paradoxically, on some sort of emotional high,
>> emotional involvement AND, necessarily,  emotionally detached in order
>> to draw at all. Perhaps when in the grip of extreme emotion (fear,
>> panic, anger, boredom) one can't draw at all; it takes a degree of
>> detachment and/or total immersion, the Zen state of 'knowing/not
>> knowing' to execute in a way that is somehow true to the felt
>> (emotion) subject or object of concern. And I don't think the
>> "emotion" is one felt by the artist and then "expressed" but is
>> integral to the total situation. What might be the emotions felt by a
>> first time student in a life class-and how might that effect the first
>> attempts at drawing? -and in a class of others, mostly unknown to the
>> student?
>> I taught drawing for some 30 plus years and know some models who had
>> emotions about it too-often resigned contempt and/or possibly pleasure
>> of the exhibitionist sort. And we all, of course, tried to keep it on
>> the high plane of disinterested aesthetic research-a quasi scientific
>> attitude (emotion?). At best, our emotions are complex, often not even
>> registered consciously and are part of the enabling or inhibiting
>> energy driving the drawing process.
>>
>> In the case of this drawing, thoughts and memories mix with the
>> feelings of my total involvement. It stuck with me. Some 60 years
>> later I re-purposed the drawing by digitizing it and combining it with
>> some photographs I took at the same time in the embattled (June 1952)
>> POW camp. This resulted in the second image, "...AND SO WE LEFT THEM"
>> realized last year in a solar print. The fotos are of the US halftrack
>> armored vehicles, the guard towers and ROK horse mounted guards
>> arranged as right and left borders. So, feeling, memory, thought-all
>> components of "emotion"-lasted a very long time.
>>
>> Your subject of emotion and drawing is a very large and complex one! I
>> hope this little sharing helps to illuminate that larger terrain.
>>
>> Best Regards,
>>
>> Mel Strawn
>>>> --
>>>> http://www.strawn-art.com
>>>> http://www.melsbrush.blogspot.com
>>>> http://www.artreview.com
>>>> http://www.myebook.com/index.php?option=ebook&id=4644