First beginnings...

My blog name is taken from a quote by John Epstein's self-published Drawing From Life: A Selection of Drawings and Essays (1980).

Here's a longer extract:

Form can only be smelled out and tasted with one's tongue, it cannot be seen with the eye. Thus one must fill one's eyes with one's nose, lips, tongue and ears when onefaces outwards. It is also important to face what one likes. Our appetite for the subject must be full of desire to make it one's own (i.e. 'take it in')... Seek out the smell of the subject, that is the particular quality of its music. Often if a subject feels dead for you, it is because you cannot recognize its smell.

What of those who find this difficult? Let us further our aim to mark out the sensual life. Imagine if this regaining of our senses was a global activity...

It takes an extreme dedicated effort to let go and perceive with one's nose. There is something behind what seems to be. It is in fact right under one's nose, but one needs a diviner or divining process to sense it out.

I know this can all sound a bit la-di-da... but i've actually experienced it when i've been drawing...

I drew this picture about a year after my stroke at a local art class. I had to put the pen on the paper and not look at it again as I drew - I could only look at the bunch of roses.

This technique forces you to draw what you see before you and not what you think you see.

It forced me to really concentrate on the form of each rose, each, leaf, each stem. And yes, I could smell the roses in front of me, through my nose, but I could also sense them. I was tracing out their essential 'roseness', as it were...

None of this was done consciously at the time, but I was reminded of the experience when I read John Epstein's words...

And this is one of the reasons I want to draw:

I want to experience this timeless, placeless, fully present, sensual moment time and time and time again...