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
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