Skeeter Teachings

There is often a sense of struggling for a sense of touch as you try to define something through plane and line. In the process of drawing from observation, you come to associate the act of looking with the movement of your drawing hand and its pressure against the paper. At times the prior knowledge of a texture and form of an object that you have held or touched becomes synonymous with the sensation of trying to draw it, as if you're slowly gliding through your mind towards that sensation. If you've ever worked in a darkroom to load photography film into a cannister, there is a moment where you still see nothing but blackness, but you can sense how far out the walls are. Similarly in drawing, you can actually concentrate on what the object feels like and wait till your drawing visually produces a similar sensation as it defines the form. Like the wall you can't see, the closer you get to the form in drawing, the stronger the sensation.
Occasionally in a life drawing class, you may see a student adopt the pose of the figure as a way of understanding what it feels like-using the feeling as a guide so that when the drawing visually gives off a similar sensation the student can recognize it. You have to believe that sight and touch are linked.


10 years ago, I was in Florence studying drawing. From 4 to 5 hours a day I was required to draw from plaster casts, and another 3 to 5 hours were devoted to figure drawing. I was an american that didn't speak italian, drawing 8-10 hours a day on a cement studio floor, then walking back a quarter of a mile on cobblestone to a room in an apartment without air-conditioning. My legs and back were taking a beating, and I was daily in a hurry to get off my feet after class. One evening I quickly fell asleep on my bed without undressing, without closing the window, and fell into a dream that proved no escape from my workday.
I dreamt I was working on the same drawing of a roman portrait bust I had been plugging away at in my waking hours.
Because I failed to close the window before slumbering, there was a battalion of mosquitos in the room taxiing for opportunities to land for a meal. This got incorporated into the dream. I could hear the wax and wane of the high pitched whines and hisses defining the distance of the room through the mosquitos proximity to my ear. Everytime a mosquito landed on me, it would in the dream correspond to the area of the drawing where the proportions were incorrect, an area that needed attention. As my arm in actuality would go to where the mosquitos made contact, I was reworking the lines and planes of the portrait in the dream.



(A poem for mosquitoes: you the lovers, with lack of lips, only bite, when try to kiss.)