Draw (Daily Planet email #1127)

I want to draw that house but houses are boring. Well, sometimes they’re interesting in their geometry or implied stories, but they’re finite by design and so very similar. Windows are tedious. Wires are an irritant at best, and gutters are somehow tragic. I want to draw that other house, but how to capture the resignation of the siding, the old-man constancy and impotence of its dormer, the tender optimism of three new bay windows? When I could be doing almost anything else, why etch the dull tessellation of shingles, and why give any time at all to the two deck chairs that no one ever sits in? I consider the garbage cans, six soldiers in motley assemblage – even the irony is boring.

The landscape of context calls, but how to capture the tousled humidity of a changing season? A prowling cat in a parody of ferocity? That fleeting buck, suddenly up the hill? Roofs as backs, the hunched weeping of a weary house, clad in abandonment? I want to include the brocade of birdsong and the detached commentary of the dried leaves’ tumble. Where to put that sudden swell of atmosphere, so breathtaking, so life-giving? The depths of the water, the tall grass purr, and the porch-light prayer – all demand an answer.

I want to draw this scene, but do I begin with the dark or the light? Do I start with the tautened trace of architecture or the skittery tufts of trees that strain above? I could draw this rock or its moss or those shadows contained or a slug that slides in the undermoss, tentacles tasting a different morning? My hand pauses in infinite zoom, groping through the haze of possibility. I decide on a single section of fence, a two-rail with the top dowel partially failed, pinching a triangle on its slow journey to no-fence. My pencil quickly shades the weathered veins on its mottled post, a dim-sky reflection on a sallow surface, four bars both earth-held and heaven-bound.

Daily Planet Productions Ltd.

With what shall I fix it, dear Liza,

with what?