I asked my dad the other day what I ought to draw next. My inspiration had disintegrated and fallen like dead skin, like dust, on the floor and the table and the mattresses. He looked at me and said, shrugging, “I don’t know. Draw this house. Draw it from the outside, with the Christmas lights.”

So I did.

I’m not as comfortable drawing constructions as I am drawing faces. By that I don’t mean that I find it harder to draw a house than a man or a woman, but that I find it joyless. Methodical and simple to a fault. With faces, each one is different. They all share a number of commonalities, but the elements that set each of them apart are what make the experience of drawing portraits all the more exciting. Every face needs to be approached differently. A new method must come into play for each one. Not in the case of buildings or homes. Not the way I saw it. A rectangle remains a rectangle, however wide, however big it is.

My opinion has changed slightly since my dad’s request. I see that houses, like faces, are all different, only sharing some commonalities. Like the rectangles. So I’m practically a hypocrite for dismissing it as joyless in comparison. I admit it. I do.

I clearly overlooked the beauty of drawings houses. I drew my house that night, in less than an hour, with a nervous hand and thick ink. I then chose a pale, ash-yellow color scheme. I saw it in the grass and decided to apply it to the rest of my work. I was done after awhile and looked down at what I had done.

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Do you know what is scariest and most thrilling about drawing the house you live in? About sketching down the mere shapes of your friends’ complexions? About taking someone you admire and make art about them? About him? It’s coming to grips with the reality that you’re creating a different person, a different house altogether.

I’m not a fan of ultra-realism. I like the thickness of the ink, I like choosing a color scheme that doesn’t belong to the picture I’m looking at. I like watching the marker bleed into the page and cross the black line between a subject and the emptiness behind them. I like using one or two colors, most of the time. Because I’ve come to know with time that the thing that hurts my pride for a certain drawing the most is the comparison between the subject I was watching and what I had created to mimic it. In most cases, my art grows old, into an amorphous reflection of something beautiful that I failed to copy. So I don’t copy. I may take a peek into pictures, then go to work on the paper. On the tablet.

Because I don’t want to see my friends’ faces collapse into gelatinous monstrosities two years from now. I want to look at them and smile, knowing that, in their absence, I still have the people in the picture that I made. And they’re looking at me.

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THANK YOU FOR READING!

As you can see, I’m choosing to illustrate the entries on “Blanca’s Notebook” digitally with my new iPad because I got Procreate and I love it! So yeah. I hope you like them.

In the (probable) case that I don’t post until 2021, I hope you have a fantastic last days of 2020 and that you start the new year with enthusiasm and excitement for the changes ahead. I know I’ll be ecstatic to see this one come to an end…

Until next time, as always, take care! I love you all!

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Copyright © Blanca Parga 2020

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