ON DRAWING

by Darden Smith | Mar 2, 2015 | And here's another thing..

I like to draw pictures.
But, being left-handed, stuck in these damn right-handed desks at school,
I have a hard time making drawings that aren’t all lopsided and weird.
The other kids, being kids, tease me about the bizarre scrawls on my paper.
So at the bitter age of ten, I’ve figured out how to make the teasing stop:
I quit drawing.

I make up a story.
And the story is, “I can’t draw.”

In 1989, in L.A., in the studio recording what will become Trouble No More,
Scratching on a newspaper with a pencil and I accidentally draw a tree.
Suddenly I’m nine, sitting in the back of the class,
Lost in the land of crayon and construction paper.
The world opens up to me again.

Now I fill notebooks with weird little black and white pictures
And there’s not a straight line to be found there, and it doesn’t matter.
I don’t make the images to show people.
I don’t need a gallery wall for proof they’re valid.
Just the doing of it is all that counts now.

But sometimes I still think about all those years I spent believing that story
I tell myself when I’m ten. It’s a story of no, and it’s wrong.
Because I listened, I missed out on a lot of joy,
A lot time dragging ink across a page.

Don’t listen to the teasers.
They probably don’t like art anyway.