I’ve recently returned to regular sketching/drawing, thanks to the Sydney Sketch Club Meetups and its loose association with the global Urban Sketchers movement. The Sketch Club offers a chance to look and learn from colleagues; the Urban Sketchers preach uploading work to the Net. Like many Urban Sketchers, I like the idea of ’visual reporting’ as well as linking sketching to personal identity and history.
During 2011, I’ve ventured into wet media as well as traditional pen and ink, as well as some bookbinding and relief printing. I finished the year honing skills attending an 8-week introductory drawing class as a prelude to some painting in 2012, probably portraiture. I manage to balance almost-daily sketching/drawing with a full-time university study load.
Belonging to a minority group, I despair at the bizarre notions of normality and belonging which the larger society fosters around me. Over the years, I’ve developed observation skills to survive. Sketching helps put close observation to good use; at its worst, observation can border on hypervigilance, a condition to which gays and other marginalised are particularly prone, spending inordinate amounts of energy watching and analysing opportunities for communication, if not contact, while straights and those in power constantly patrol the borders of their gender/sexuality/territory.
Gay artists, and would-be gay artists, are not crash-hot on draughtmanship. Which is not unique to us by any means in this day and age. While not wanting to retreat into a pompier world, of drawing for its own sake, or pushing Western naturalistic representation as the pre-eminent way of seeing the world, or merely seeing sketching as ephemera sitting behind a Major Work in another medium, I’m finding weblogs are good for sharing ideas behind the works otherwise seen without explanation or context on popular photo websites.
