What Taking them Off taught Me.

New glasses New way of seeing

I got new glasses recently.

This is relevant but not in the way you'd expect.

I wore them to a life drawing session in Paris with "life drawing Montmartre" ,side note highly recommend them, which seemed like a reasonable thing to do. I am a painter. I was there to draw. Surely seeing more clearly would help.

It did not help.

First attempt

I kept trying to draw the model and the glasses were giving me every detail, every line, every distraction between my eye and the page.

The problem was I can see close without them -- the glasses are for distance -- and with them on my sketchbook was a blur of too much information. My hand didn't know what to do with all of it. I kept taking them off and putting them on. Off and on. Off and on. The other artists were very polite about this.

Then I took them off and left them off and the shapes came through. Simplified. The details fell away and what remained was the thing I actually needed -- the gesture, the weight, the form. Not every crack and line of a foot but the feeling of it landing on the page.

I have been thinking about this ever since.

I am still learning when the clarity helps and when it gets in the way. At home I draw without them because that's what my hands know. On this trip I took them off and put them on approximately one million times in various situations, adjusting to a world that is sharper than I used to see it.

There is something in that worth sitting with. Sometimes you see better when you remove the detail. Sometimes the shape of a thing is more true than every line of it. Sometimes the foot you are trying to draw only makes sense when you stop seeing everything and just feel the weight of it on the page.

I am still learning this. About the glasses and about other things.

Jackie