Mike Is Being an Artist Again

From a Sonlight buddy’s blog. I love to read about folks my age who are rediscovering their lost passion for art.

(While your visiting listen to the fiddle music. It’s great!)

Man decorates basement with $10 worth of Sharpie

Kratzer’s basement suggests that the great cultural influences wandered out of college humanities class — here a Churchill for eloquence during harsh times, a Joan Crawford for cinematic vampiness, Holmes and Poirot for great literary characterization — and set up shop together in the carefully hand-drawn markings of an educated imagination come to life.

Kratzer might be a lawyer by day, but in his off hours he is a man who has taken the artistic influences and heroes of his life and imagined them onto his walls, that he might keep company with them while he uses the pool table.

My youngest daughter is keeping a nature journal for school and through her effort I caught the bug. No, I will never be Grandma Moses, but neither am I the hopeless artist my family thought I was. My journal has some nice drawings. The kind that I don’t care if anyone else sees because their joy came to me in the drawing of them, not from others telling me how great they are. Today, Barb wrote this on The Heart of Harmony blog:

I was one of those children who really had a desire to learn to draw well but was never encouraged or guided in learning to do so. I started to think that you had to have an inborn talent for drawing or you couldn’t do it. I sort of gave up on the idea of drawing and became the “math girl”. No one really asked me if I liked math, they just assumed because it came to me easily that I enjoyed math. I went on to become an accountant since I was the “math girl”.

Wow! This post could have been written by me. She has words of wisdom regarding how to teach art to our children, but her recommendations will work just as well for an adult unearthing a Hidden Art. In another excellent post she discusses the myth that real artists are pleased with most of what they produce.

Do you doodle incessantly? Have you ever felt the urge to pick up a pencil and capture an image on paper? Are you picky about how hard or soft your pencil is? Drawing could be your unfulfilled talent ~ your Hidden Art!