This started out as a quick pen sketch in a journal from when I was in Maine in 2008. It’s a lighthouse outside of Portland along the coast. I scanned it into a file ages ago when I went through some of my journals and scanned in the drawings one rainy afternoon with nothing else to do, and just recently found the original scan and got interested in it for some reason. I turned on the cintiq, fired up a drawing program and started redoing it from the sketch and my memory of the place.
I was never very good at drawing or painting. Except for the usual childhood drawings done for school, I never had any interest in it. I started drawing people in the early eighties, my kids, friends. Was never very good at it, to be honest. Still am not. Probably because I never did enough of it to learn the skills necessary.
Buildings though… For some reason I enjoy drawing buildings. Perhaps it’s the lines, the geometric shapes, the detail, the structure. I don’t really know.
Pen and ink, pencil and now on the computer. I think I do it for the same reasons people do things like needle point. It’s relaxing, soothing, calming. For me, at least, it’s a kind of meditation, I think. I find it soothing to concentrate on the shapes, the lines, the detail… The mind, the eye, the hand, all working together, coordinating together, watching a collection of random lines slowly transform into a recognizable thing…
The journal got lost or destroyed somehow. I’m rather sad about that because I’d wrote a great deal during that trip about the things we’d seen, people we’d talked to. Including some memorable and remarkable encounters we had.
Like the Italian restaurant we ate at in some city in New York. The food had been fantastic, and we told our server to tell the chef how delighted we were with the whole experience. Well, it was late, almost closing time, we were the only ones left and were getting ready to leave ourselves, when the owner/chef came out with a bottle of wine for us and we sat and talked with this delightful fellow over a bottle of wonderful wine for almost an hour.
Or me and eldest son stopping at a gas station in New York. We’d been on the bikes for over a week, wearing full riding gear so only our hands were exposed to the elements, so our hands were tanned dark, dark brown while the rest of us was your typical pasty Wisconsin cheesy kind of look. Two young black guys selling car polish in the parking lot took one look at us and had to come over and check this out. They were hilarious, asking us for tanning tips
I’m still hoping those journals turn up somewhere buried in the attic somewhere perhaps…
Back to the drawing… I worked on this obsessively for several hours while, believe it or not, the second season of Witchblade was playing on the other monitor. I got this far and just completely lost interest in finishing it.
Maybe it’s because I can’t draw water?
grouchyfarmer 
It’s wonderful.
Say what you will about computers, if you back it up, you can’t lose the journal entries and pictures. I also don’t know what happened to my journals and tons of my sketch books.
I try to remember that the act of writing or drawing is what I enjoy, but its nice to occassionally look at the product of the act, all the same.
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I’ve lost so much stuff over the years — all of my fiction from writing classes in college, sketches, journals, photos. I’d hoped I might find a least some of the earlier stuff from when I was in college when we cleaned out my mother’s house after she passed away, but nothing turned up. Some of it is digitized now, like my photos, and I’m paranoid about backing that up. Not only copies on external hard drives but on the cloud as well. But the rest of it… It happens only in a haphazard fashion.
You sound like me — the act of writing and drawing is what I enjoy the most. The end product— Meh… It’s like my “The World’s Worst Novel”. It’s been in more or less continuous production for something like fifteen years. It’s been scrapped, rewritten, hacked at, fiddled with… It certainly is never going to be published anywhere. I do it more as a form of self therapy, I suppose. The same with drawing. I’ll do it obsessively for days on end, then not do anything for weeks or months. I don’t do it to produce some kind of end result, I do it because the process seems to help me clarify, focus, work things out.
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