Sometimes - A few things I’ve learnt with the group

Some weeks ago, I was attending to my first meetup “Free drawing in the capital P”. As Socrates said “I know that I know nothing”. This is so true,but I feel that the nothing I know today is much better than before those meetups. I want to share with you a few ideas I had while exchanging and looking at other people’s drawings.

Meetup #1 - Sunday papers at the Luxembourg garden
At the end of this meetup, as usual, we were exchanging about each people drawings. One of them was a statue of an actor done by Cris in the Luxembourg garden. Dov chose it among Cris’s drawings and showed it to us. My first thought was “this is not a drawing, this is not finished!”. But, then I looked at it better, I liked it a lot and I understood that:

Idea #1: With a simple single line, you can express a lot

Then I was imagining the character was watching me, that was great, and came this other idea:

Idea #2: It’s good to stimulate viewer’s imagination





Meetup #2 - Meditating at the Medici
Again at the Medici fountain with Nathalie and Dov, drawing people around... Before leaving, we were talking with Dov:
Dov: Have you learnt something today?
Me: I’ve learnt that it’s good to draw fast to catch the first impression
Dov: Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn’t.

idea#3: I shouldn't have dogma about drawing, and should add the word -sometimes- to the rules

Meetup #3 - Back to the crime seen (/strange weather)
That meetup in petit palais was amazing. It was about the void. That was my favorite meetup. Taking inspiration from Taoism, Dov asked us to draw empty spaces. I realized that it could be great to suggest things instead of drawing them. There was a lot of nice drawings that day. Here is one of them (by Marie), the one in the middle, there is a window, a part of the inside, but not the room around it...

Idea #4: Sometimes, it’s good not to draw everything

Meetup #4 - Drawing Red Harings

That meetup was another challenge. We were drawing Keith Haring statues. Those statues are subtle, but their shapes are simple.
My previous ideas were not so good to draw the statues, maybe because Keith Haring did already something similar:
- Idea #1: With a simple single line, you can express a lot”
- Idea #2: It’s good to stimulate viewer’s imagination
- Idea #4: Sometimes, it’s good not to draw everything.

So came another idea, that is the opposite of #4:

Idea #5: Sometimes it’s good to draw more than everything
And, Nathalie’s drawing is a beautiful illustration of it! with more colors and lines, I really like it.

Conclusion:

Here are the 5 ideas again:
- Idea #1: Sometimes with a simple single line, you can express a lot
- Idea #2: Sometimes it’s good to stimulate viewer’s imagination
- Idea #3: Sometimes we should have no dogma while drawing, and should add the word -sometimes- to the rules!
- Idea #4: Sometimes, it’s good not to draw everything
- idea #5: Sometimes it’s good to draw more than everything
There was two others meetups for me, and they were very interesting too, so this is an open list of ideas!

I hope you enjoyed reading this.

François