A sketchbook project, like this one with the bees, is easy to re-enter and exit when life gets complicated. To be able to focus on something familiar and settle the mind is wonderfully satisfying.
Bees (a reprise)
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Tag Archives: bees
Bees (excerpt) installed
I’ve mounted and installed a number of the bee drawings in the faculty show at Emily Carr. Although I often draw in sketchbooks, I typically don’t leave the drawings in the book once they’re done. This set have been mounted on two different depths of small wooden cradled panels.
More bees
When I start a new drawing project I’m not always aware of why a particular subject has captured my interest. There is always a link of some kind between my psychic state and the subject of my work. Sometimes I’m aware of this link at the onset, and other times I discover it through the process of drawing.
I started these bee drawings while I was on holiday, so I had more time than usual to contemplate my surroundings. But why bees, I wonder? I’ve never drawn insects before, although many of them interest and delight me.
Perhaps the anxiety that bees evoke is what engages me; the painful possibility of a bee sting and the much larger anxiety of contemplating their precarious state within the natural (and manufactured) world.
(Trying to draw) bees
While on holiday in the Okanagan I became fascinated with the bees working in the lavender bushes near our patio. They’re completely impossible to draw, but I couldn’t resist trying. Strangely, expecting and accepting failure provides a strong motivation within my drawing practice.
