Creative Path Studio: Trish Roque’s blog, studio, and musings on living a purpose-filled life.

I’ve been thinking about writing this post for quite a while now but procrastination seemed easier. It’s a tough topic for me to write about because it’s a quest that I take to heart. The search gets tiring, and sometimes, I just don’t have the energy.

What is my bliss?

I’ve been on this quest since the day I promised myself that I would not work just for money. I remember that evening quite well, even though it was over 20 years ago.

I was watching the PBS series on Joseph Campbell’s The Power of Myth with Bill Moyers. I was in high school, maybe sixteen years old at the time.

I was completely drawn into the messages Joseph Campbell gleaned from decades of research on the various mythological stories of the hero and the hero’s journey. The one message (and he had many) that hit me in that space of absolute knowing power was this: “Follow your bliss.“

From that evening forward, I was determined to live my life with passion, to follow my bliss. What did not occur to me at the time was that finding my bliss was the first critical step. I assumed I knew what it was — that is, to be an artist.

I thought, “I don’t know whether my consciousness is proper consciousness or not; I don’t know whether what I know of my being is my proper being or not; but I do know where my rapture is. So let me hang on to rapture, and that will bring me both my consciousness and my being.”

–Joseph Campbell

I tried it and the rapture was, well, inconsistent…

After four years of college, I moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, where I followed what I though was my bliss for six years. I loved living in New Mexico - I loved the simplicity of my life, I loved the landscape, I loved the serenity I found, I loved the people I met. And most of the time, I loved making art. But I did not feel the rapture.

There were also times when I felt the rapture with other endeavors - for instance, when I hiked the wilderness with my canine companions. There was nothing that compared to the feeling of being atop that 12,000-feet high Mt. Baldy, just BEING with the mountain, the sky, the wind, the sun, and my dogs.

Yet it is important to note that following one’s bliss, as Campbell saw it, isn’t merely a matter of doing whatever you like, and certainly not doing simply as you are told. It is a matter of identifying that pursuit which you are truly passionate about and attempting to give yourself absolutely to it. In so doing, you will find your fullest potential and serve your community to the greatest possible extent.

–Joseph Campbell Foundation website

After determining that art-making was really not my life’s calling, I packed my Toyota, and at that point, my one dog Siwa (beautiful Smokie had passed away), and headed further west to California.

Getting lost and finding my way back

After arriving in the Bay Area, I found myself in a situation that I promised I would never put myself in - to take a job just for the money. I suppose I didn’t have a choice at the time, given that I had rent of $1,000 per month and credit card bills that funded my move. Regardless, I did not make it to a year at the job. I had to quit because the job was killing my spirit.

Forward to five years later, on the eve of my sixth anniversary in the Bay Area, and my search for meaningful work, my bliss, continues.

While I enjoy my current occupation of freelance designer and part-time webmaster at a university department, I KNOW that I do not feel the rapture. I continue to hike in the East Bay hills, and though these parks are quite beautiful and serene, I do not feel that same sense of BEING that I felt in the high mountains of Santa Fe. No rapture there.

However, these hills provide me with the quiet and solitude that I need to listen. It has been a challenging six years in the Bay Area, and only recently have I heard my inner voice again. I believe I am slowly finding my way back from being lost…

Continuing the search for meaningful work

I believe my story is more common than it is rare. It is the fortunate individual who knows from a very early age what his or her calling is. And I mean, truly knows — from the depths of their inner being. I can honestly say that I did not know what I would be when I grew up. Like many ten-year olds, I had a range of responses, from astronaut to pilot to veterinarian.

At 34, I continue my search.

While I don’t necessarily prescribe to Steve Pavlina’s method of finding my life purpose, I have recently been moved to tears by issues involving animals and wildlife. I felt that tug, that feeling in my gut that I’ve been called to action.

I am in the process of acting upon this feeling. I will share more once I see results.

Why not art?

I find it somewhat ironic that I’ve been enjoying my art class so much, yet, I do not feel that it is my bliss. For me, art-making is merely, for me.

I derive great pleasure in interacting with other sentient beings, preferably, the non-human kind (and I don’t mean computers!). I think it is my need for this interaction that prevents art-making from feeling blissful.

Anyone who knows me knows how much I love animals. Perhaps I can turn that love into a life of following my bliss!

Sherry, my drawing instructor, offered a very good critique of this portrait. My drawing hand, the hand that appears closer to the viewer, is smaller than the hand further back. That is not good foreshortening - however, to my defense, the smaller hand WAS my drawing hand. This meant I would draw, place my hand back on my leg and commit to memory what I saw, and draw again.

Sherry also picked up on the fact that I had no clue what the grades of graphite meant in terms of application. She gave me a lesson on graphite hardness and softness: B stands for softness - the higher the B grade, the softer the graphite, the more velvety, and the darker the effect. H stands for hardness - the higher the H grade, the harder the graphite and the lighter the effect will be.

So, I should have used a 6B on my hair, under my ear in the shadow - not continuously drawn over the area with the same hard graphite, producing a shiny effect instead of a velvet darkness. Very bad!

However, I had fun drawing, and ultimately, that’s what I care most about. This drawing was done with graphite pencils and sticks on 18″ x 24″ Basingwerk paper.

Week 6: Oh the irony!

This class did not help my pencil drawing skills whatsoever, but, you know what? I didn’t care! This class was so much fun!

The lesson for week 6 was on value and light, and the study of chiaroscuro, one of my favorite methods of drawing and seeing the human form. In the exercises above, I started with a dark tone, and slowly erased to reveal the light areas, while adding value to express the dark areas.

I wasn’t as successful with the left drawing above as I was with the right. The biggest reason for this: my carelessness in choosing my medium. *Sigh* And this, my friends, is a great segue into Week 7.

Week 7: Portfolio review and a lesson in cross-hatching & other techniques

After a series of one-minute gesture drawings (two of my favorites are shown above), Sherry, our instructor, set the model into a long pose for the rest of the evening. I began drawing a study of Karen until it came time for Sherry to review my portfolio.

Sherry spent over an hour reviewing my work and progress in the class. She offered me some practical lessons in cross-hatching, and constructive advice on how to achieve my goals in the class. I have to admit that Sherry is a great hands-on instructor.

I’ve taken classes with some very fine artists and I never quite “got” what they were saying. It seemed to me that a lot of what they had to offer was more theoretical, more a “feeling” for the form and/or object.

Sherry gets right down to the bones. She will take the pencil and show me how to hold it, how to cross-hatch and remind me to keep the point sharp and follow the plane. She will take the stump and blend the charcoal that I am using to show me how to get the effect I am striving for. She will take tracing paper and draw directly over my figures to demonstrate the technique I usually fail to achieve.

Overall, she acknowledged that I understood and drew the human form adequately but that I needed improvement in technique and the proper use of my many tools. Isn’t that what I’ve been writing all along?

I read an article in the New York Times recently, an article that tugged at my heartstrings and made me ask myself once again, what am I doing?

The article was about elephants, and more specifically, the crises we have put elephants in, and how elephants are responding to that crises. These elephants are not doing well. I’m saddened by this. I also became overwhelmed by the feeling of wanting to do something to help.

I love these big beautiful creatures — ok, I’m really a sucker for all critters, but elephants have a special place in my heart. The first non-abstract, non-stone-carving sculpture I ever made was of an elephant. (If I ever find the cast of that elephant, I’ll post the photos.) I made drawings of them - an homage of sorts to these beautiful, social animals.

This article led me to the websites of the Elephant Sanctuary and PAWS, two organizations dedicated to providing sanctuaries for elephants (and other creatures in need). As I read about the work of these organizations, I felt that tug again.

I don’t exactly know what that tug is about. I know it’s important and that I must explore its message.

It’s been five weeks since my life-drawing class began. Though this evening class makes for a long day, especially after a full day of working, I look forward to it every week. My initial goal for this class was to learn to really see - to observe, and truthfully record that observation. While that goal hasn’t changed, I’ve discovered that the process of recording that observation needs refinement.

In my previous post, I wrote about falling in love with drawing with charcoal and how working with this tool affected my later drawings and etchings. I need to build new experiences, discover and play with new tools, and learn to use them properly. I can’t just rely on past habits and experiences since that is limiting.

In the past couple of classes, I’ve made a concerted effort to draw with a pencil. The results of weeks 4 and 5 are below:

I find that using a pencil for gesture drawings is challenging. Actually, I find any kind of drawing with a pencil challenging. Why? Here’s my list of reasons and challenges:

• Using line expressively is not necessarily difficult. It takes practice, and currently I haven’t had much of it.
• I have a habit of wanting to smudge the drawing, creating messy cross-hatchings that in effect negates line quality.
• Holding the pencil in a way that allows me to have a sensitive touch to the drawing surface is a technique I haven’t quite figured out.
• I have yet to learn to use a pencil properly. That is, keep the point sharp at all times, use the proper hardness value for the right task, and not smudge!

This short list of challenges is really not that difficult to overcome. As I’ve written before, all it really takes is practice.

Though I don’t feel I’m getting enough practice, these past five weeks of drawing have been more than what I’ve done in the last six years.

Knowing When and How to Use the Right Tools

I’m beginning to understand the importance of using the right tools for the job at hand. This is one of those lessons based on common sense, yet, I am the first to admit that I am sometimes lacking in this (common sense, not lessons).

Reviewing my history in art-making may help me to understand my own bias with the tools that I use and how this may hinder my current progress. This is not judgement on my part, but a genuine desire to interpret truthfully on paper what I observe.

Experience and practice should inform decisions to pick up a tool over another, but sometimes, mere habit creates this decision, resulting in a mis-interpretation of the observed.

College and the Charcoal and Conte Crayon Years

When I took my first drawing class in college many years ago, I fell in love with charcoal and conte pencils. I loved being able to smudge and move values around with an eraser, my fingers, the palm of my hand, and whatever happened to be available in my artbin. The whole process was quite messy, and often, I ended up with dark drawings.

I loved drawing in this manner, and quite enjoyed playing with dark and light values. I once sat in a bathroom stall which had black marble walls just so I could draw my reflection against a dark surface. An example of the kind of fun I had with charcoal, dark & light values, and black paper is a self-portrait I created in 1993 called “Mask”.

Journals & the Ball-point Pen Years

As I began to draw more, I became more pragmatic about my tools. It was difficult to trek around the subways of New York City with big pads of charcoal paper and my conte pencils. So, I carried my journal and my handy ball-point pen and drew whoever I could as quickly as I could. This still resulted in messy drawings, with the quality of my lines behaving more like heavy charcoal marks. I’ve included some examples from drawings of NYC’s homeless (above).

The Santa Fe Etching Club Years & Printmaking

I also created etchings as though I were using charcoal. Any experienced etcher/printmaker can appreciate the quality of line and tonal value in printmaking. My prints did not have much of that line quality and rarely exhibited the crosshatching marks of a master printmaker/etcher — I did not create Rembrandt-like etchings (though Rembrandt is one of my all-time favorite printmakers. Seeing his original prints in his studio in Amsterdam was one of my highlights this past summer.) Here’s yet another example to illustrate what I’m writing about. Pictured is an etching called “Flight” ca. 1995 (right).

The Road Map From Here

My drawings and etchings remained consistent in look, feel, and style throughout the 90s. The examples above are good illustrations of what I am referring to.

I stopped consistently drawing in 2000, when I arrived in California. This post won’t discuss the reasons why. Suffice it to say that I am ready to pick up where I left off, though technically, that is not what really occurs.

I did not pick up where I left off. I am many steps back, but I am making the steps nonetheless. Taking the class at the community college was one of the best decisions I’ve made this year. The next challenge is to make more time to draw on a daily basis.

My next post will examine what I am currently trying to achieve in my life-drawing class. This involves using tools properly and knowing when to use them.