hands, cats & horses

I've been getting a lot of practice drawing one of these lately.

Every artist has some subjects that make them a little nervous to draw. For me, it’s always been: Hands, cats & horses.

Horses & other hoofed animals are still a kind of grey area for me because I never practice them. (Although I grew up on a longhorn cattle ranch with a fancy quarter horse stable…Seems like I missed a real opportunity there! But it wasn’t our ranch, weren’t our horses, I never learned to ride…I was in the field playing with the cats…)

“like a horse & a carrot” - a recent horse-ish rendering from the notebook

But after some very intensive figure drawing years in art school— spending six hours a day three days a week just drawing naked people (aka bliss, honestly)— hands got a lot easier! When I get to the hands in a figure now, I take a deep breath, and I practice what I know. I will forever feel like a novice. Hands are just LIKE THAT FOR SOME REASON?? But I can break down the shapes. I’ve got my method that get the job done and I’m always learning.

Untitled figure detail, ‘22 [i actually love drawing feet]

These are fast studies from figure drawing jam with Alecia Sacred Heart on the Vision Train last month aka ART GYM!!! (And this is a quote from Gaston Bachelard I think I ran across somewhere on a newsletter…)

Cats, though. Cats! I have lived with and loved so many, many cats.

(In some ways it can be very hard to draw the things you’re closest to… parents, lovers…)

Cats are real great characters.

And their squishy, fast-moving, easily-morphing anatomy and square little heads have always tripped me up on the page.

Since November, though, I’ve been gettin’ in a lot of practice with a new kitten who is utterly batshit crazy and needs to be adored, petted, snuggled and paid attention to by any means necessary, 24 hours-a-day. And while he has sent me into exhausted tears on more than three dozen occasions (per week), I’ve gotten a lot of opportunities to “observe” him…

Just look at that winning grin!

Here he is after walking across my breakfast plate, tracking maple syrup across the table…

He’s always very rowdy in the morning. When I’m trying to have sacred sketchbook/poetry time, he’s busy being an absolute terrorist. So I wrote a poem about that:

he's watching shadow of birds, flying
leaping off the wall
calling out in languages intertwined in time
in my tongue we call this song

leaping off the wall
giving form to air
in my tongue we call this song
so i sing along

giving form to air
it's time to yell!
so i sing along
this precious furry thing

it's time to yell!!
calling out in languages intertwined in time
this precious furry thing--
he's watching shadows of birds, flying

[morning pantoum, march 20th, 2024]

yes, we’re using the spray-bottle “training” method— the issue is that he also LOVES WATER!! Wooohooooo! Woohoooo!!

Okay! So, a prompt for you:

What subjects give you pause on the page?

I know some of you are artists who draw stuff every day and some of you are genuinely scared to try drawing anything at this point in your lives. (But I suspect that if you’re here you’re at least art-curious— And you know I will encourage you to follow that curiosity to the page! NO LIMITS!! NO RULES!! GET FREE!!!)

At some point, all of us have encountered this hesitancy, though— and I’m interested to know what those things are for you.

I hear a chorus of you all saying, HAAAAANDS!

And: I believe in you! You’ve got this!

But what else?

For some folks it’s eyeballs or it’s antlers, or it’s mouths or teeth or bird feet…

Can you engineer some opportunities to draw that thing a bunch of times in the next week? Is there an animal or object you live with that you can observe and observe and observe and see what happens? Or can you gather some reference images and give it a go a few (dozen) times?

You’re gonna surprise yourself with your progress, friends! And it feels so, so good to release some of that fear and hesitancy and just go for it…

xo,