Many years ago, there was a little boy who wanted nothing more than a horse. That's actually a lot to "nothing more" about. But he knew this and so his desire hurt even more because there would never be a way to fulfill it. His yard was too small and the lack of fencing meant he couldn't have a dog either... his second biggest hope in life. He did end up with a couple of gerbils but I digress. The horse!
He knew he couldn't have one in a million years. That joy was reserved for knights, cowboys, and Indians which he noticed got the best deal overall because they also didn't have to attend school or wear clothes.
So the only way he would ever enjoy anything close to horse ownership would be to draw them.
But horses are hard.
Horses are agonizingly hard to draw. No matter how he tried he couldn't seem to make the blobby figure on the page resemble the regal form in his mind. His horses looked like bad Halloween costumes for bumbling detectives. It was all this little boy could do not to go out and sulk.
Luckily his mother knew a little something about art and decided it was time to teach this boy to draw horses. But what might have been a simple drawing lesson turned into something that would change his approach to life forever. That's what I'm going to talk about today.
Down the hill from our house was a little pasture with a couple of old swaybacked ponies. I was very proud of knowing they were swaybacked. You had to know a lot about horses to know that's what you call old horses. We took a couple of note pads and went and sat down in the gravel on the side of the road. Mom patiently showed me how to look at a horse and notice the more basic shapes that make up the entire horse. If you've ever looked through a “how to draw” book, this is what they teach you to do. I still remember the order. We started with the oval curve right there in the crease of the hind leg. The horse was facing left. My knights would ride left forever after. She showed me how to lightly pencil in the swayed back and barrel of the horses chest followed by the curve of the neck and then the head.
In all of this I was learning to see. For the first time in my life I noticed that the hind legs were turned backwards on a horse. No wonder my previous attempts had looked wonky. Drawing a horse, the impossible task, was suddenly doable when I learned to sit down in the dirt and study what was really there. And so a little kid learned to do something he'd wanted almost as much as his own horse.
The bigger picture is the way this experience changed my life. My parents fostered a culture of creativity. We didn't have much money, but luckily we had a few things that mattered. There were some tools in the garage, a sewing machine in the sewing closet, a pottery wheel and kiln we were lucky enough to never find a buyer for, a kitchen with an oven. There were a few things there and we were lucky enough to find some surplus materials here and there. There were big roles of fabric from Grandpa in the closet, some scrap wood from down on the tide flats. Some rope, some newspapers, some clay. Library cards: Eight of them, and weekly trips to dig through the mountains of books at our local branch... maybe they were more like hills but we checked out a lot of books.
Basically it all boils down to one very important life lesson:
If you want to do something impossible, you only need to sit down in the dirt for a while and study it out. There's always a way to accomplish things. You may not get it right the very first time but find your passion, dive into it, and let that drive you on to greater accomplishments doing things other people say are impossible because they're too hard.
Learn. Live. Live. And Learn.
Happy Birthday Dad!
