Tag: Challenges

Photographers may Disagree with Henri Cartier-Bresson

Photography is an immediate reaction, drawing is a meditation.”
– Henri Cartier-Bresson
(Drawing Quotes to Speak to the Artist in You)

Frame—Drawing in Process.
Frame, Drawing in Progress, Hendricks©2023

Yesterday was my seventieth birthday, and I am beginning my third year of retirement, I have one bold request.

As a gift to me, could you subscribe to this blog?

ArtChangesLives(Dot)Com is owned by me and started in grad school almost two decades ago. Subscribing to my blog will help the blog’s rank on Google and other search engines. I hope it will become a place for people to share their thoughts while creating artwork … Meaning any of the arts.
I don’t know if I intend to show or sell my work commercially, but I am heading that way.
Thank you to the artists who agreed to let me link their sites to this site. Most of these individuals are friends.
Art has a vital power to promote understanding of one’s self and the world and provides a path for an artist to self-realize and connect with the known unknown.
It is a big ask, but could you subscribe to this site? I’d appreciate it.
BTW, my 70th birthday was fabulous, hearing from friends and family and spending it with family.

Trip to MOCA, Museum of Contemporary Art

The Scream, I felt the frustration.

 Nature is not only all that is visible to the eye… it also includes the inner pictures of the soul.
— Edvard Munch  (Virtual Art Academy)

The Screaming Head, Henry Taylor, Side B, at MOCA.
The Screaming Head, 1999, Henry Taylor, Side B, MOCA show 2023

A few days ago, I visited the  Contemporary Museum of Los Angeles (MOCA) and saw and enjoyed Henry Taylor Side B show. The exhibition was a retrospective of  Henry Taylor’s work—primarily portraits. The work, The Screaming Head, 1999, stopped me. Similar to Edvard Munch’s work The Scream, where I felt fear, panic, and anxiety down in my soul. Taylor’s screaming head, I got the absolute frustration and angst the artist must have experienced as a black man. 

It is a remarkable piece.

New Works–Words I Cannot Spell

a digital image created by Bill Hendricks
Bill Hendricks © 2020

“Disobey Me” is a poem by Sally Gardner. 

They told me I was dyslexic

it didn’t describe me
belonged in the library
of words I can’t spell|
no matter how many times they tell
you just try harder sound it out
simple when you think about
it. Stop giving me the third degree
don’t put me down
don’t make me fret
I can’t learn my alphabet
it doesn’t go in any logical order
the stress gives me attention deficit disorder
at school I wanted to go it alone
they told me that’s unwise
they called me unteachable 

The poem continues …. Disobey Me

Please visit the other images in the series, “Words I Cannot Spell” (words-that-i-cannot-spell-an-experience-of-a-dyslexic/)

The Drawing that Will not be Done

The drawing wants to draw what is invisible to the naked eye.It’s very difficult.The effort to write is always beyond my strength. What you see here, these lines, these strokes, are rungs on the ladder of writing, the steps which I have cut with my fingernails in my own wall, in order to hoist myself up above and beyond myself.

Cixous, Hélène, and Catherine A. F. MacGillivray. “Without End No State of Drawingness No, Rather: The Executioner\’s Taking Off.” New Literary History, vol. 24, no. 1, 1993, pp. 91–103. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/469272
Mixed Media Drawing by Bill Hendricks
Drawing Without End Hendricks © 2021, mixed-media, approx: 5″x 5″

This drawing lingers for me. Not wanting to call itself done. Yet, even when I call it finished, it calls me back. A friend asked me what I was doing a few times when he called from New York, and I told him, “I am working on a drawing, and it won’t end.” He asked me, “How do you know when it is done… Don’t you stop?”
Well, no. You don’t just stop. Some might say I should. I am moving on, but it sits on my desk. Done for the moment. 

Just another picture until the next

“Must you know that yours will be the “better” picture before you pick up the brush and paint? Can it not simply be another picture? Another expression of beauty?
Must a rose be “better” than an iris in order to justify its existence?”

Neale Donald Walsch, Friendship with God: An Uncommon Dialogue
Graphite Drawing,
 Making Creation, 5″x5″, mixed media, Hendricks © 2020

I had a few busy weeks just wanted to check in and post an image that I completed. Spending my time between working with my monthly meeting and yearly meeting.  I am happy I can continue using my design skills to help out. 

As I draw, I notice I am becoming more critical of my work. I am slowing down, considering aspects of the drawings more closely. I guess that is why I like this quote. Does the next drawing have to be better than the last?  Yes, I want to learn and travel the path with more skill, but skill is produced not only by study but by practice. 

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