[Steven Sweeney]

Perhaps, Jacqueline, a gift you could present to yourself is permission now to let those other folks proceed along the paths they've chosen, while you continue to enjoy and enhance your experience with the pleasures that your training and talent have provided. You have substantial energy directed toward what others are doing, thinking and saying, energy that could be redirected now to such productive use in your own work.

I did a still-life painting last year that included a background in which was depicted, quite loosely, a famous Chinese brush painting, very simple (a plum branch, a bird), very beautiful and perfectly suited to my composition. When I showed the original of my work to my Mandarin language tutor in the U.S., I felt obliged to explain that I had sort of tried to represent but not really copy the painting . . . and she was quite confused by my "admission", because in the Chinese art tradition, the hallowed regimen IS copying the masters, and until you can accurately replicate the ancient drawings and paintings, you haven't done the training. I also learned from the same woman a good deal of Chinese calligraphy, doubtless some of the most beautiful artwork one can do (entire exhibitions exist that are composed of scrolls of calligraphy). Every stationery store in the Orient is rife with the standard calligraphy workbooks for schoolchildren, dotted outlines of the characters that are filled in, white silhouettes of characters on dark backgrounds that you "trace" with your inked brush (ink ground every session from soot sticks and water), and so on, until you're ready to execute the strokes freehand. With somewhat cultural irony, it would be considered arrogant in this tradition to represent oneself as an artist until mastery of what had been accomplished before you had been demonstrated. In the West, we tend to admire and revere the Radical, the Upstart, and yes, the Drip Painter (of whom one, in another forum and not entirely with agreement, I've expressed some admiration.)

There is tracing that is skipping work, and there is tracing that is doing work. I was never trained to trace, but I was certainly trained to copy masterworks, in the course of which, even in a "simple" line drawing, I had to consider the length, angle, quality, width, and, yes, even velocity, of line, and try to duplicate it. The number of erasures required in the first starts always exceeded the paper's tolerance for ignorance. Eventually I got smarter, just barely, than paper. But that's no small pleasure.

We're all on our own, here, eventually. Many of us reach a point of complete hopelessness, and then we start working to reclaim hope. Sometimes, the effort leads to very satisfying artistic expression. Even the Prince of Wales is an avid watercolourist, completely enamored of it. Isn't it lovely that even Windsor can't resist the call?

As public TV veteran Alwyn Crawshaw ends his painting videos, "It's easier than you think. Why not give it a go?

Steven