I just discovered Marina and the Diamonds and thought it would be cool to draw her.  I didn’t quite get her but that’s okay. I’m learning to stop comparing my work to some amazing artists who do realism.  I love my pen outlines – reminds me of my brother’s DC and Marvel comic books from where I learned how to draw.

Yesterday Marina posted a quote on her social media accounts and I knew I had to get the book for my collection:

“A species in which everyone was General Patton would not succeed, any more than would a race in which everyone was Vincent van Gogh. I prefer to think that the planet needs athletes, philosophers, sex symbols, painters, scientists; it needs the warmhearted, the hardhearted, the coldhearted, and the weakhearted. It needs those who can devote their lives to studying how many droplets of water are secreted by the salivary glands of dogs under which circumstances, and it needs those who can capture the passing impression of cherry blossoms in a fourteen-syllable poem or devote twenty-five pages to the dissection of a small boy’s feelings as he lies in bed in the dark waiting for his mother to kiss him goodnight…”

~ Allen Shawn, from Wish I Could Be There: Thoughts From A Phobic Life

I love how I immediately recognized Marcel Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time” and how this passage – all 24 pages – comes to life as he muses along and it doesn’t matter how many pages the words occupy.  That’s the beauty of writing, I think, and in essence, of creating anything from nothing – or in Proust’s case, from memory.