Mickey's sacred face and St. Peter's mouse ears
I have to admit that when I was a child I liked watching TV more than drawing. I even watched TV while I was drawing.
Everything I've learnt about this has been the result of a bad combination, like mixing wine and milk. I'm not against mixing things, quite the contrary, but this one in particular makes you sick to your stomach.
I suppose I drew as a child because it was free and didn't bother anyone.
The thing is that without being aware of it, as a child and innocently, you copy even if you don't understand what you're doing.
The act of drawing can be understood as an instrument to get to know oneself and one's surroundings. With the years and rescuing the drawings I made as a child, I can perceive an act of obedience to a sweetly stupid being. Not because they were bad, which they were, but because of the impulses or motivations to draw certain subjects repeatedly.
At art school I once heard a painter say that he learned the concept of art by drawing the same stone over and over again at different angles. I smiled with that arrogance that ignorance gives you. I learned to draw by copying Mickey's face and always from the same angle, only changing the expression; laughing, smiling or laughing.
A stone doesn't do that, or so I thought. - It doesn't do any harm - my mother would say - keep colouring and don't get out of line, it's beautiful. And these things that ‘harm no one’ are, ‘to this day’, the ones that make me suspicious.
‘As of today’ I sincerely believe that drawing Mickey's face killed any glimmer of creative release I might have had, or rather, it killed my adventurous spirit outright, treacherously, like a cowardly, duplicitous killer.
One of the good things about drawing is that you can design the rules of the game, it's free verse, you don't have to follow anyone's guidelines.
Anyone would kill to see the illuminated, liquid and beautifully diluted face of Saint Peter opening the gates of heaven, and not the well-defined face of Mickey that illuminates your mind in such a way that you can't see anything else. Once you get inside you don't come out. I'm sure the last image I'll see before I die will be this little mouse bastard waving goodbye with his four-fingered hand.
How much I miss drawing in those days when it wasn't a sin to step out of line.
The escape, at this point, is to undo the face, to dilute it in acid, to find or make the stone under the face emerge. The animal figure must be made to emerge, to emerge from the burrow into new, disparate and even contradictory landscapes. We have to look for the conflict, break the shop windows with those stones painted by drunken artists and erase the face to start drawing lucid and beautifully diluted heads of all the San Pedros of the world.
That is the beginning.
Everything I've learnt about this has been the result of a bad combination, like mixing wine and milk. I'm not against mixing things, quite the contrary, but this one in particular makes you sick to your stomach.
I suppose I drew as a child because it was free and didn't bother anyone.
The thing is that without being aware of it, as a child and innocently, you copy even if you don't understand what you're doing.
The act of drawing can be understood as an instrument to get to know oneself and one's surroundings. With the years and rescuing the drawings I made as a child, I can perceive an act of obedience to a sweetly stupid being. Not because they were bad, which they were, but because of the impulses or motivations to draw certain subjects repeatedly.
At art school I once heard a painter say that he learned the concept of art by drawing the same stone over and over again at different angles. I smiled with that arrogance that ignorance gives you. I learned to draw by copying Mickey's face and always from the same angle, only changing the expression; laughing, smiling or laughing.
A stone doesn't do that, or so I thought. - It doesn't do any harm - my mother would say - keep colouring and don't get out of line, it's beautiful. And these things that ‘harm no one’ are, ‘to this day’, the ones that make me suspicious.
‘As of today’ I sincerely believe that drawing Mickey's face killed any glimmer of creative release I might have had, or rather, it killed my adventurous spirit outright, treacherously, like a cowardly, duplicitous killer.
One of the good things about drawing is that you can design the rules of the game, it's free verse, you don't have to follow anyone's guidelines.
Anyone would kill to see the illuminated, liquid and beautifully diluted face of Saint Peter opening the gates of heaven, and not the well-defined face of Mickey that illuminates your mind in such a way that you can't see anything else. Once you get inside you don't come out. I'm sure the last image I'll see before I die will be this little mouse bastard waving goodbye with his four-fingered hand.
How much I miss drawing in those days when it wasn't a sin to step out of line.
The escape, at this point, is to undo the face, to dilute it in acid, to find or make the stone under the face emerge. The animal figure must be made to emerge, to emerge from the burrow into new, disparate and even contradictory landscapes. We have to look for the conflict, break the shop windows with those stones painted by drunken artists and erase the face to start drawing lucid and beautifully diluted heads of all the San Pedros of the world.
That is the beginning.