Have You Ever…?

Have you ever tried deliberately to do a “bad” drawing?

A while ago, I heard an interview on the radio where a voice teacher was discussing one of her students who was having trouble with a certain range of notes. To address this issue, the teacher asked her student to first try to sing those notes badly, to make the worst sounds she could imagine! Which got me to thinking. How difficult would it be to do a deliberately “bad” drawing? And could this actually help us to draw “better”?

We are so used to striving to do our best that to do the opposite is almost unthinkable. It’s like drawing in the dark, as I did with this scene of a tango performance at El Arrabal in Córdoba. In times like this, one has to trust the eye and the hand, and the mind that controls both.