I need to start blogging some more. Even though drawing and creating visual pictures is an excellent tool for me to channel out ideas and thoughts, writing seems to add the little extra missing. Recently I was also being suggested to add a little bit of text, quotes or thoughts beside my drawings or sketches, and it seems to add a nice effect infact.
What I experienced today, when I was visiting the Ebeltoft Safari Park-zoo with two fellow drawing-friends, was something which somehow confirms me in my opinion of other people around me. What happens when you work very closely with drawing, anatomy, volume, shapes, people and all that good jazz is that you gradually start becoming more aware and sensitive to your surroundings. This also makes you more vulnerable to your surroundings who may consider this sensitivity odd and a sign of weakness, but let's discuss that some other time. Basically you start noticing small things around you, all the time. People's personal characteristics, the appearance of the wires and lights on the streets, the way people walk, the mystical ever-changing appearance of the clouds or the god rays streaming through them. Basically everything around you is becoming much more fascinating, more interesting to study, cause it have its own uniqueness that you suddenly pay attention to.
So when I was walking around with pencil, tusch, sketchbook and two equally excited friends, sketching and noticing the fascinating creatures around us – I simultaneously noticed the people around me; the rest. The typical danish people. The shouting kids scaring away the animals, the annoyed fathers talking on their mobile phones and the mothers carrying the food basket. The former description sounded perhaps a little stereotypical – my real point actually being another; The way people study the animals and the zoo in general. They do see the animals – and yet they do not ”see” them. Their gaze briefly strokes an elk, a warthog or an ostrich – before they've already left it, only having their lunch and ice cream in mind. The actual behaviour, walk, appearance or characteristics of this animal doesn't interest them the slightest. Surely one cannot blame kids on this kind of attitude – they're full of energy and life, this is more like a general observation.
And perhaps this lack of observation and fascinating-dimension is not so peculiar after all – people have different interests – I might only discover this being an artist myself. If I were a musician, a writer, a sportsman or something else – perhaps I'd consider everyone around me missing some different kind of golden opportunity, to truly understand their surroundings? It sounds so arrogant to say that most people around you hasn't been ”enlightened” yet, yet that it how it feels when they act like mindless blinded people, not noticing the world around you.
Yet it comes to my mind that living a ”normal” life may be much more troubleless, with less worries and more straight-forward-driving through the paths of life - just having to worry about simple and down-to-earth things in life. And even an artist may attempt to live an ordinary and normal life on the outside, in an attempt to cover their own inner madness and thoughts - it will never stop them from wondering about the universe and the fascinating life around them. And I never will either!
Thanks for reading by with my philosophical babbling :) - And here follows some selected sketches I did at the zoo
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