In his book The Natural Way To Draw, outstanding art teacher Kimon Nicolaïdes offers this advice: “Draw anything.” Those two words helped me get through this difficult prompt. I did not want to disgust anyone, so I departed a bit from clinical realism and drew the WORD booger and make it just boogerlike enough to get the concept-point across. I’ve been fighting the urge to blow my nose since I started this thing.
Many years ago Kimon Nicolaïdes, an art instructor, produced an immensely popular book, The Natural Way to Draw. The book is full of wisdom, including a schedule of drawing exercises, a boatload of drawing examples from raw beginner to accomplished master, and the two words of advice that have yielded for me almost fifty years’ worth of rich reward: “Draw anything.”
A willingness to draw anything is a willingness to fail. Every drawing is an approximation, but some subjects for drawings–layered reflections, for instance–are acid tests of patience and skill. The drawing I provide for this post certainly fails the test. It is clumsy and compositionally shaky. But my next drawing will be better precisely because this one is so flawed. It builds my determination to slow down, focus and consider. The next drawing is always, to some extent, an apology and a repentance for previous drawings.
My sincere apologies go out to Emma Thompson. In trying to learn her face I’ve brutalized it, taking Kimon Nicolaides’s advice to not be afraid to overwork a drawing in order to learn. Then I did another face study which was UNDERworked. Meanwhile the acrostic poem I cobbled up is full of vagueness, that nonspecificity that may not apply to Emma Thompson much but does not not apply to her. In my defense, Ms. Thompson, the final image and poetry will benefit from these early egregiousnesses.
That said, I did find a cracking good quotation from Meryl Streep that says a lot about the real Emma Thompson as reported by the real Meryl Streep. Therefore, along with what I’ve learned by falling on my face with my versions of her face, plus the inclusion of the all-important word Wit in the acrostic, I’m compelled to declare victory in the execution of stage 2 of 6 of The Emma Thompson Project.
Quoth Meryl Streep regarding Emma Thompson: “She works like a stevedore, she drinks like a bloke, and she’s smart and crack and she can be withering in a smack-down of wits, but she leads with her heart.”
Words to the THOMPSON EMMA double acrostic:
The screen & stage enjoy her vital flame
Her honesty–an ethical gendarme
Harmonics with some dissidence the theme
Outstanding nuanced capturing the aim
Might find her as a widow on a farm
Morose and grappling with her self-esteem
Perhaps a crisis or a death may loom
Perhaps a challenge to her wit & charm
Swept by the wind or by a careless broom
Old–young–carefree, or full of belladonna
No telling what the consequence of karma
Nor even what variety of fauna
One with Clay, Image and Text 