I’ve always been one of those ordinary guys, you know, just a plugger — nothing outstanding. I have a short memory so if I’ve done something great I can’t brag about it because I can’t remember it. Maybe that’s why I am prone to look forward rather than back. What is happening today and tomorrow are the important things. And for a person that has that forward-looking trait, I think it’s especially important for him to have a good solid philosophical and psychological undergirding. The word gird is very apropos here because it means to prepare (oneself) for action. The action, in our case, is drawing; that impassioned desire to express oneself, that urge to create that ingrained need to interpret one’s surroundings. It is the need to make or create a tiny bit of order, it is the need to express some of the myriad of impressions we have gathered in all our hours of looking and seeing and observing, it is the pleasure that comes from corralling form and content and assembling them into a new thing — preferably something that no one else has done before — at least not quite in the same way.
All of this takes energy. Energy of a special kind. For an artist, energy is in constant use and demand. A gardener cuts his lawns, trims his bushes, and his work is done — he can go home, open a beer, and watch TV. A cartoonist or an artist draws all day then goes to a drawing class at night or studies a book on anatomy, heads, composition, perspective, caricature, acting, or some related subject. If he watches TV he is either sketching the actors or studying the action or the way the dialog is delivered, thinking how he would have improved this or that scene if he were the director. In all his waking hours (sometimes in sleep) he is mentally transposing his environment into compositions, delineating certain lines, stressing certain shapes — working one against another. He talks to someone, missing whole sentences while concentrating on how the lines are delivered rather than what is said.
Clearly and simply, man, and the artist in particular, is a creative being. If you take that away from him (or if he relinquishes it himself), he is less than his potential. So who needs potentials? I’ll tell you who needs them — you do, I do. This world was created by some creative energy (you name it as you see fit) and that creative energy that founded it and now runs it, is working in and through you now. Do you not feel that surge of energy and awareness tingling at your fingertips and it’s motor humming away in you solar plexus. Is your mind not spinning with thoughts and ideas — is it not always searching, searching, searching. The awareness of it will be strongest in the springtime when the earth around you begins to hum with the renewal of life. But here’s the wonderful thing — man’s renewal is not dependent on springtime. A mere re-dedication to creativity is all man needs to start the creative juices flowing and then suddenly there is energy to “pull it off,” energy that seems to feed upon itself, so that each moment becomes a fresh start, each experience a new event, and the vision is forward-looking with anticipation and wonder — not backward looking, full of regrets for neglected opportunities of the past, or negative influences that creep in and block our vision.
Yes, the action is drawing and the preparation is aligning us with that creative energy, becoming a channel through which it can find expression. Think of the universe as full of energy (it is, you know) and that energy is swirling around us waiting to take on some form. All we have to do is open up our consciousness and allow it to enter — and in a way that no one else in the world can, we express it.