Mid-term Self-Assessment

My drawings are boring.  I've chosen to try to learn a difficult task, that of expressing spatial relationships, and while I can't help but think that every effort I've made so far in that regard constitutes a major triumph, I also can't help but see that my drawings are also boring.  I need to think more about mark making and value, and some color wouldn't hurt either.  Plus I just haven't been putting enough time in.  I don't know why exactly. My husband's operation and stay in the hospital was why I didn't work last week, but it doesn't account for previous weeks.  I think maybe it's because I have to take two steps backward in order to go forward. The drawings I made when I was looking at vases and bottles set up in Morandi-like compositions are much more accomplished that what I have made so far this Fall.  They are modest accomplishments, but  better.  I look at collections of contemporary drawings and see the wide range of possibilities for mark making.  I see the drawing that I started by rubbing over a collograph plate.  They seem much more interesting to pursue than the task I have chosen for myself.  But I'm not ready to give up.  

Throughout this floundering, reading Rackstraw Downes has been a comfort.  After finishing his series of razor wire paintings he wrote, "Why do I always flunk sky painting?"  Then he went  on to name contemporaries who are skillful at the task.  Downes wrote the introduction to Art in Its Own Terms, a collection of Fairfield Porter's art criticism.  Here is Downes on Porter's early struggles:
   "Porter had to work hard for his eventual accomplishments. Rudy Burckhardt recalls seeing in his studio a painting with an awkwardly cropped composition; when he pointed this out, Porter replied that first he had to learn just to paint: composition he would worry about later.  But he was certainly not bothered by self-delusions on this issue: he once wrote to a friend, "It is interesting about your reaction to my early paintings. It was not so different from my own: I, too, thought them atrocious."    

On the other hand, I've really enjoyed the reading about and by artists and the looking at art on the internet. In A Printmaker's Document, Jim Dine tells how he made a series of self portraits not by using a mirror, but, instead, nailing copper plates  to a wall and using the reflection of his face in the shiny copper surface to guide his had as he drew.  If I were more interested in my face, if I had a beard or interesting tufts of nasal hair, I'd be interested in doing that myself.