Expat artist's sketching lets her discover the Mexico around her.
-
Loading... - Fiona Cullen
- 11 May 2022
- 311 Views
- 0 Like
- 0 Comment
“Most people kind of get the basics of learning to draw and see it almost as an addiction,” says Susan Dorf, an urban sketcher and art teacher in Pátzcuaro, Michoacán. “When you’re sketching, you drop into that deeper place which is sort of meditative.”
Dorf has been meditating and sketching in Mexico for the last 10 years, and it has meant a whole new palate and landscape.
“I like to see what’s up close, what’s far away, how can I bring that all together,” she says describing Mexican markets, whose swirling movement and vibrancy inspire her work. “I like to be in the middle of life and what’s happening.”
Dorf has been teaching sketching, drawing and painting for 12 years, and she’s learned that the hardest thing to get over when you start to draw is, basically, yourself.
“The main thing to overcome is judgment and fear,” she says, “So, when I can get people into a place where they can be neutral, so that not only are they not feeling judged or criticized but I’m also not praising them either, there’s a sense of not having to live up to anything.”
“If it’s perspective or scale, it’s all the same; it’s learning to see — you are basically exercising your eye and your mind and your hand to coordinate. And if you’ve not done that, it’s really awkward, but if you practice, you get more comfortable. You’re learning how to see things in a way that is different from just glancing at it or recording a symbol of it. You’re slowing down to really see it.”
Dorf is a believer in sketching the landscape around her and the people in it: when she lived in San Miguel de Allende, she was a constant fixture, recording life in a city that is both very traditional and yet also changing rapidly due to the near-constant demand for new construction.
She even got a gig doing urban sketching for the local weekly newspaper, Atención San Miguel, a job which continues today even though she no longer lives in the city.
People have always drawn, from cave walls to prestigious arts schools, but the current Urban Sketchers movement that Dorf is part of was started in 2007 by Spanish journalist Gabriel Campanario, who started sharing his drawings online.
In 2009, Campanario formed the Urban Sketchers International nonprofit, a group that unites sketchers all over the world and that offers “chapter” affiliation for groups like the one that exists in San Miguel de Allende.
Dorf’s teaching helped to form the chapter, and many current group members have taken her workshops. Read More...
