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Let’s discover new shapes

21 Jun 2020

By Yasodhara Pathanjali   It’s Sunday again and Aunty Yasodhara is here to have a chat with you about art and creativity. How was your week? Are you enjoying your online classes? Is it nice being able to go out a bit again? We’ve still not gone out of Colombo, but hopefully during the next couple of weeks we will. There’s a beautiful park that I’ve found out about so I’m looking forward to going there so I can sketch in the presence of nature. Have you ever gone out to a park, a botanical garden, or your garden with a sketchbook, to draw from the shapes that you can see? Me and my children go to a botanical garden or even just to our garden every so often to observe, to explore, and to learn from the shapes and colours out there. Did you notice that I didn’t say “to draw the leaves and flowers”? Instead, what I said was “to learn from the shapes and colours out there”. Do you know why that is? When we try to draw exactly what we see, to copy what’s in front of us, all we are doing is limiting ourselves and our imagination to the objects we are looking at. However, to grow our creativity and imagination, it’s important that we break down what we are looking at into shapes, movements, colours, and feelings. So rather than drawing the object that we can see in front of us, we explore the shapes, movement, and colours we can see, and the emotions that we feel. When we do this, we discover new shapes, new creations, and new paths to take with our drawing that we didn’t have before. If you look at all my paintings and all the weird, imaginary, and beautiful flowers and leaves in them, all of them come from some kind of real thing that I once saw and took inspiration from. So this week, I’d like you to go to a park, garden, or your own garden (if you don’t have access to a garden, you can look up leaves and flowers online; that works too) and really look at the shapes, the colours, and the movements, and how it makes you feel. With this, start to sketch things on your paper. Don’t bring an eraser for this activity; you shouldn’t be erasing anything out. Sketch to develop the shapes on your paper the way that you think it can be or should be. Play with colours to see what kind of colours you think this creation could be. It’s NOT about drawing exactly what you see in front of you. It’s about using the image in front of you to create something in your mind. I will gather a few interesting looking leaves and (if I can) find some flowers to show you what I mean when we are Live on Friday at 4 p.m. I think it will be really interesting to see how the different drawings by Anuradha, Indumathi, and I, while looking at the same leaf or flower, will turn out. That will be because we are three very different people and so what we see and experience from the same image will be very different. And this is what “art” really is. If you have fun doing this exercise, please do send me a photo of your drawing to creativityforabetterworld@gmail.com. I can’t wait to see all your work. I love seeing all of them.  


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