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Sara Pendergast's avatar

I spent the last 11 weeks drawing the same still life. My marks trying to pin down what I saw. Each day for the first several weeks I’d come to it only to find my marks of the previous day not quite depicting what I saw in front of me. Only after frustratedly re-rendering the piece again and again did I realize my light source changed as the sun rose and fell. I could not hold a constant view on these objects.

So, then, the questions I posed to myself changed. How might I drawing something that changes? Everything changes. What about change is important to my drawing? How do changing conditions influence my ability to see? How might I become more attuned to changes as they influence the way I am seeing something? What about my reactions to changes as I view something is worth making into a mark? All these thoughts I found to parallel your musings about writing today.

In the end, I am trying to learn a nonverbal language to help me think about life. And, I’m just beginning…

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Celine Nguyen's avatar

I loved reading this, and it's such a beautiful way of making the abstract belief "writing helps you think more clearly!" into a sharper, clearer process. Making one's tentative, early, provisional ideas more concrete in writing ("unfolding" those ideas and beliefs) forces intellectual rigor—and it's a form of rigor that can't really exist as long as things are just sitting in the mind, unactualized and unarticulated.

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