Happy September to everyone out there in the Do Art Nation. To my fellow Midwesterners: welcome to my favorite time of year! The weather usually pulls back from the hottest, muggiest extremes. Fall decor appears in earnest. Football begins, and passion of people from all walks of life is on display as we enjoy community and vicarious play. It’s great time of year for in plein air painting, crafting, and my personal favorite WRITING! Something about fall has me excited to sit in front of a computer screen with a document editor open, watching the blink, blink blink of the cursor, leaning back and trying to translate the visions in my head to words on the page.
But there are ALSO some stories I want to share with you from our epic Summer Reading season this year! One that I keep coming back to comes from the weekend I spent in Ohio, the day before a Comic Book Workshop in New Lexington. In many ways, it was a typical lazy Sunday on the road. I packed up my campsite, went to the gym, did some laundry, and did some sketching in my notebook before going to bed–all done in a lackadaisical fashion, as anticipation built for the week ahead.
But even a lazy Sunday will have a few surprises in store. I found the nearest Planet Fitness, walked inside, and found someone drawing at the front desk! He was drawing a character he knew from the Netflix show The Amazing Digital Circus, as well as some characters from a mobile game called Limbus Company with literary characters like Dante Alighieri and Raskonikov from Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. We chatted about the mobile game–Crime and Punishment was the book that hooked me on Russian literature in high school, and I was interested in how Raskolnikov was portrayed as female, and related to the other characters.
I left him to his drawing (I am not sure what Planet Fitness’s policy is on sketching during work hours, so I’ll leave the name and place out). As I was leaving, I saw that two more people had joined him. One girl, who also worked there, was drawing some of her own original characters, while another boy was making comic book characters in Procreate. They said they liked to meet up in the lobby and draw together, which they said was the best creative outlet they could get in the small town they lived in.
I gave them some of our original comics and headed out to break down my campsite and do some laundry. It was a thrilling act of serendipity–sometimes I really do think I’ve become a magnet for artists, who are often eager to share their work if it seems like someone is interested. It also really drove home how the artmaking process connects people, even with something that seems as solitary as sketching in a notebook or drawing on an iPad.
Creating spaces like that, for people of all ages, is one of the most personally rewarding things about Do Art for me. I can’t wait to bring it to towns large and small, and do my part to uplift ART in a world that often treats it as a second class citizen in the educational landscape.
Do YOU have friends that you like making art with? Let us know! As always, we’re enthralled and intrigued by what you create, and the way you use it to enrich your lives. Keep doing art, do art nation, and we will see you soon!
