What I teach is not easy, it’s not generally easy to express ourselves! It’s much easier to teach technical tips, and they’re really great to have in our toolkit. But expression? That’s a messy, unpredictable, original thing. Original because it’s different for everyone. Messy because we find out through doing, experimenting and trying stuff out. When you experiment it doesn’t always work, but you learn something new every time. Today I did battle with a drawing. I lost and found it over and over. Layers of beauty ruined and recovered. I don’t want to be tight and afraid. I want to be free and brave. When my fear tell me to stick with something cos its OK, and I might ruin it otherwise, I want to keep going. I want to find out how it might turn out.

Expressive drawing is unpredictable, because it’s an adventure. Not everyone wants adventure, and that’s perfectly fine. It’s great to learn skills, apply them, and get really good at them. And know what to do. What expressive drawing is for me is getting really skilled at seeing, being responsive, shifting gear, changing things, and seeing what happens. And writing our own map as we go. What did we do? How did it work? How did it feel? My drawing isn’t over, and it isn’t finished. I don’t know if it’s any good or not. But I do know it is telling me something, teaching me through the adventure of figuring it out. And I love it for that.