Further on the black bird

You would not believe how hard I find it to draw a simple, bloody, bird. Or in this case less of a bloody bird and more of a black one.

I met up last night with Hannah, along with other First Time Club people and artists. I didn't particularly want to go, feeling anti-social and like it was a waste of my time -- but of course as these things often go it was nice to meet new and interesting people (one much older guy I remembered, with a shudder, from the life drawing session) and there was talk and debate about our individual works, which I found especially fascinating. A couple of people were current or graduated art students and they tended towards conceptual ideas, and while I have no intention of going all multimedia on my piece, it was surprisingly helpful.

From looking at my small-scale "mock up" of my work I realised that it was way too literal. The text I had more or less filled the page with was almost wholly unnecessary -- which I had been starting to see when the night before I had been sat up, painting all the words on a page with a brush. It's when you spend so long on each letter and each word that you re-evaluate just how much text is needed. Through a discussion with Hannah about it I saw that I was kind of beating the audience round the head with my idea -- rather than letting them work out for themselves the quite obvious interpretations of my picture, I was taking them by the hand and walking them through it all. Very slowly. I also considered how much time I generally pay to large blocks of text in a gallery -- the answer is very little.

The text in the picture is to be reduced to the bare minimum. A brief line or two about being a happy child, but still a child that was plagued with recurring nightmares. Then perhaps a line or two about the dream -- playing in the garden one minute, snatched away by this bird-as-metaphor-for-the-devil the next. C'est fin.

I poured my heart about my frustrations with the bird image -- or at least kept banging on about being frustrated and unable to draw. I have been encouraged to stop taking everything so literally, that although the bird image I found was all very nice, why does it have to be that one? Why does what I draw actually have to be a faithful picture of a bird? Now I'm not suggesting I glue a half-empty yogart pot to a canvas and claim that it "represents" a bird, but more that I can try a more abstract or surreal image. After all, it's about a dream.

I've been searching some more, and leaving behind google image search found some very interesting and inspiring images on Etsy and Flickr. This latter bird, by an extremely talented young lady by the name of Sherri Burhoe, is perhaps more along the lines I should be thinking. It has that dramatic feeling to it, and it gives me that uneasy feeling in the pit of my stomach.

The Etsy artist -- Pamelam -- has a much more surreal approach to her bird pictures which again I love, and it makes me very jealous. You might look at those pictures and think "How hard can that be?" The outlines are surely nothing too taxing, but even those seem to be eluding me. I have been sat with my sketch book using crayons and pencils for what feels like hours. I'm beginning to think I should maybe have nightmares about parrots instead, since that seems to be the closest I come to anything resembling a bird.

I'm hoping that swimming tomorrow and Saturday spent with my paints and sketch book will afford me some progress... and maybe when I manage to draw the bird right, I will scan in all the rubbish ones, so everyone can see I'm not making it up how rubbish I really am.