Here are a few pages of my practice with a brush pen. Please forgive me, but I'm just starting. I know that the paper I'm using is working against me, but it is all I had at the moment right before Hurricane Beryl, but I wanted to start right away. The light pressure and firmer pressure is something I need to really keep working on.
I remember as a kid really liking to do certain exercises over and over again, many times while in conversation, and sometimes silent. I didn't care, I just loved repetition to the point that I barely remembered what I was doing. The action was secondary, but it was still being performed, even unto excellence, but done by rote.
I loved to play catch either with a baseball, football, or even a frisbee. I love to kick a soccer ball back and forth to someone 20 or 30 yards away. There is something about the repetition that I felt a calming or a comforting in my soul. It could be just for the sheer joy of it.
It could be for the connection with the other person involved, but I think there is a transcendent place or time where things seem to pause and the world seems to wait on us as we go through the motions of thought, technique, give and receive, and joy.
Later in life I see it as a kind of communication that jazz musicians might find with likeminded peers.
I can see this same give and take when I make letters--not necessarily in the drills of lines and curves--but in the making of letters, which become words, then sentences, paragraphs. Eventually that mystical alchemy of the soul discovering an idea, the idea becoming flesh-the written word- back to idea, being perceived by another soul leading to understanding.
I'm not very good at this, but I like the trying. I want to look back on these in a few years and see my progression in this art.
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