The Art I Made in November

My Weekly Abstract Meanderings

I have made it a habit to draw one pencil sketch per week. These drawings usually take a couple of sessions across two days. At the moment, I am drawing a bunch of abstract plants.

I love the simplicity of using a pencil on paper. The limitations these tools offer are surprisingly liberating. I do not have to concern myself with color. There are infinite gradations of grey and black, and I only focus on the form and texture of these shapes I am imagining.

When I was younger, I used to be incredibly impatient when making art. I wanted the instant gratification that this medium could not give. Drawing, if done thoughtfully, can take a long period of time, and I craved immediacy. This is probably why music and the piano took center stage in my life. Live music demands complete presence and disperses its sounds into the atmosphere as soon as they arrive—coming alive only in the moment, exiled to our memories, and hopelessly ephemeral.

But visual art takes its time to grow. Its gestation and formation are as integral to the art form as the finished piece.

When I draw, the process is slow, methodical, thoughtful, and organic.

For reasons unknown to me, I now have the patience that eluded me in my youth. There is something rich and gratifying found in the deliberate and seemingly endless honing of one’s imagination and skill. I can sit quietly for hours and simply draw to my heart’s content. I tinker, obsess, assess, reassess, and repeat. It is not perfection I seek but the completion of something I cannot name—something I want to fully realize.

Of course, at the end of the day, these are only little sketches that make me smile when I see them. I am not trying to make masterpieces. They convey something about how I see the world and how I feel that words cannot describe. There is some other, quieter eloquence at play.

I am happy to play as long as I want. I leave immediacy to the whims and vagaries of youth. Patience, slowness, and quiet persistence move, in fullness, here.