The Art of Patience

With what I now realise was an unrealistic ambition to design my own cover for “SCATTERED LIVES”, I enrolled for an art class at the beginning of term. I chose “Creating Beautiful Art with Coloured Pencils and Graphite” partly because I ruin my drawings the moment I add any sort of paint, and partly because of convenience. Both the timing and the location are perfect. The class begins half an hour after my shift as a volunteer in the Oxfam shop and is held couple of minutes’ walk away in the centre of Ipswich.

During the first or second lesson the tutor told me that if I couldn’t slow down, this wasn’t the class for me. I obeyed her instructions and took four hours to draw and colour some cherry tomatoes. I am now working on a picture of a cooking apple, complete with a stalk and several leaves, which I will be lucky to finish by the end of term. According to the tutor, she will only say the drawing is looking good so far, but no more than that, because I am a beginner.

As a novice writer ten years ago, I made the same mistake of trying to run before I could walk. The first draft of “ILL CONCEIVED” did indeed live up to its title. The published book is version ten or eleven- I’ve lost count.  

And the art tutor is right. I do need to slow down, notice all the different shades and textures within a cooking apple, stalk and leaves. Maybe I should do more to convey the same level of subtlety in my writing.