I was so, so, so sure I had blogged about this wonderful online practice shared in 2020 by the amazing Beck Tench. But when I went to find it to reshare, I could not find it in my archives. So today I am getting this on the blog!
On Zoom we have all these little windows into others’ faces (if their camera is on). It is oddly a great place to do portrait sketching as a way to see, to pay attention, to shift out of monkey-mind. Beck pulled this practice from her reading of Frederick Franck’s The Zen of Seeing: Seeing/Drawing as meditation.
Go to Beck’s post and read how to do it. https://www.becktench.com/blog/2020/7/26/the-zen-of-zooming
Then if you get to try it with others, I’d love to hear your impressions.
I found it really helpful to get out of my “solve the problem now” habits. To really look at another which I’m not sure we do as well online as we might F2F. When we HAVE shared our sketches with each other in all their glorious imperfections (you sketch WITHOUT looking at the sketch) we laugh, we wonder, even blush. It is a very human moment for me.
I’ll put some of my sketches below.
This is so fantastically creative and so typical of Beck. I met her I think in 2010 at a museums of the web conference when she was doing visual projects with nature museums. Her work always has been inspiring in the approaches which are original and meaningful. Thanks for this gem!
Alan, I think you were the one who first connected me w/ Beck!!
Fascinating Nancy! My sister is almost exactly a year younger than me and we had a sort of twins language where we communicated by sketching. She would sketch a few lines and pass it to me to add something. It would go back and forth, sometimes for a long time. I’m sure it had an impact on how we see the world. She’s a successful artist and I’m terrible.
We’ve been known to do it asynchronously via the USPO. In a way the days long latency adds something, changing it’s nature. You find yourself thinking deeply about your pencil strokes.