Art Note: Drawing the Heron Badly, Twice

The first drawing was wrong about the neck. The second was wrong about everything else, which felt like progress.

The heron stood in the shallows for forty minutes, which is more patience than any life model is paid for, and I still could not get it down. Herons are made of an S that refuses to be an S the moment you draw it. Draw the S too smooth and you have a swan with problems. Too sharp and you have a coat hanger having a difficult year.

Here is what I am learning about drawing badly, as a practice:

The bad drawing is not the failure. The bad drawing is the receipt — proof that you stood somewhere for forty minutes and looked at one living thing the whole time. Nobody looks at a heron for forty minutes unless they are trying to draw it. The drawing is the excuse. The looking is the work.

The second heron — the one wrong about everything else — has something the photograph would not have: it remembers which parts I found difficult. The neck I fought with. The legs I gave up on. The eye, which I got right on the first try and am unreasonably proud of. It is a map of my attention, drawn in real time, with errors where the attention wavered.

Both drawings stay in the notebook. The heron, unbothered, keeps the original.