Teaching Myself to Draw 5

At Humbug Mountain, the mist clearing at sunset, the fogbank staying offshore till morning, the moon rose through the pines and cedars on the ridges, shining over the mountain's shoulder. I tried to draw it in the morning.



Broad strokes with a brush pen. An enso standing in as the moon's mirror. The dense, overlapping layers of trees.

Cleaning out the old house and moving to my new home, last spring, I discovered two boxes of my old artwork that my mother had saved. She saved a lot of my creative work, and I never knew. I'm grateful. I can see in this old art the seeds of some subjects I still pursue. I worked for some time in acrylic. It's interesting to me, now that i am teaching myself to draw, and expanding my media in the process, to realize that I was a better artist than I ever gave myself credit for. At that time, I had passion but not training, interest but no self-confidence. I can see that I was already pursuing visionary art, which would eventually lead me to making my visions visible to other people by re-creating them in Photoshop and other digital media. I was also pursuing space art, illustrating out of my imagination those things we might someday see from other worlds, other solar systems. I remember painting this acrylic now, although I had forgotten it in the intervening years, and only discovered in one of my mother's boxes of saved art. It's of a moonrise over a glacier on a distant, cold world; perhaps the glacier is the world's frozen atmosphere, and the black of space is visible from the ground. I used only black and silver paints.



Moonrise is an eternally fascinating theme. I'm sure I'll return to it, again and again.