Sky Sea Sand
Sky Sea Sand (remake)
In primary school I was the best at drawing. My teacher, Mr. Bencley, called me Little Picasso, and I won all the drawing competitions and spent a lot of time making pictures. At high school, I was second best. Daniel Forster was much better. He could draw intuitively. I remember watching him draw from a plaster cast replica of Michelangelo’s David and later, during a vacation we took together in the south of France, I saw him make amazing pen drawings on the beach.
I am competitive, and since I knew I could not compete with Dan’s drawing ability, I understood that to be happy, I had to invent a creative way around the problem of making things look beautiful. So while Dan was drawing perfect renderings of the beach, I drew two straight lines on a page, dividing it into thirds. I wrote “sky” in the top third, “sea” in the second, and “sand” in the bottom third.
I realised in that instance that the craft and skill of drawing can be overcome with an idea. This simple realisation has changed the way I approach almost everything I make. If something does not come naturally, I search out an alternative way to respond to the problem.
