touching your feel

Developing a feel is what most people who make things are after. That and better things (drawings, breads, buildings, concerts). A “feel” suggests deep knowledge born of experience and ready at the fingertips. Drawing with a single line pumps up the demand for precision. It exposes you like an early trumpet.

Watching the Boonville Big Band rehearse weekly for a stretch now, I remain smitten with the charisma of its director, Bob Ayers. Week after week, he brings it - fresh, alive, giving it his all for that swinging sound. He convinces folks, in the most eloquent and erudite manner, of the eventual pleasure that comes through the pain of facing errors and trying again.

I admire the band’s humility. The tolerances are tight. The reprimands are soft and often funny, but they sting. Collective fortitude leads the musicians to listen, correct, get together, even after working at something else all day. Take it one more time from 49, or maybe five or six.  Whatever is necessary to go out on a high note, feeling it. Bob emanates rhythm; you see the music in his hands, radiating up his spine, and out that drumstick.

Call it what you will - skill, technique - the hardest part of developing this touch or feel is doing it when you don’t feel like it or when things are not going well.

Drawing is the same way. Never mind you’ve been practicing for years, even claiming to teach it. Today’s blank page exposes a sense that you’re starting from square one. Though far from true, a lot rides on those first few marks – scale is established; scope or limit of view; and where you are - the eyelevel. It only takes an inch here or too much pressure there, to toss all variables back into the air. My line tracing the boundary between grassy hill and towering redwoods bears no resemblance to reality. Redwoods dogging me again.

I could tear the page out and pretend it never happened. But this paper came all the way from Amalfi. I have to persevere. The paper is moot. It says nothing back to me about my arrangements.

Talk paper, talk.

Tell me where I left them stranded, unable to get over the foxtail hill and across that river of redwoods.

Tell me where the clarinet got lost in her hair.