"Blurry Vision", HB and B8 Pencil Drawing

This is the first sketch I have made in a while. It is interesting how stressful it is to stare at the blank piece of paper after such a long time not drawing. It is almost like the pencil and eraser could sense my angst. The startled look of the eye in the sketch is also a testament to my own startled-ness when I picked up the pencil. I briefly explain the sketch in a short philosophical essay before I share the video of the process of the sketch. My technique is a little different, I use the eraser almost like a pencil, coating the tip of the eraser with pencil lead. Please see the video for this. In any case, I hope you like the sketch, and the small essay inspired by the work.

Vision and a Blank Canvas: A Philosophical Essay on Seeing without Barriers

A blank canvas or piece of paper might symbolize a new beginning. Starting anew, no indentations have yet been etched onto the stainless piece of paper. Stain-less, without stain. Viewing the world without stains, without barriers, is sometimes impossible. Startled by the everyday, we cloud our vision with rigid structures to help us cope. Coping by posing structures onto the world to lessen the startled-ness, the unfamiliarity of the everyday beams like a bright light when we rid ourselves of these barriers.

But we convinced ourselves that it is a better world when we blur our vision to shorten the startled-ness. Blurring our vision, we cope with life that has become a habit. A habit of living, blurring our vision so that we might live by habit. For getting rid of the fog, the blur, we will become again startled at the strangeness of the everyday, the ordinary, the habit itself. See the canvas as blank is already a blurred vision; constructed from the remnants of a habitual structured ordinary vision. For seeing without these structures would leave one mad. Or it might be the other way round: those who are deemed mad have the ability to see without the rigid structures imposed onto the world. This seeing or awareness leaves most startled, as a result a scurrying back to order, to construction, to habit.

For is it not that our habitual structures which we impose onto the world that save our minds from going mad? Startled we might look into the abyss of a world without structure, but in the end, we would want to see the familiar lines drawn onto the blank page.