What does it feel like to draw this way?

It’s like nothing and everything. Pushing off, leaving, letting go while being completely still and peaceful as a rock. 

It’s like meditating with no wandering thoughts. I don’t go outside the paper. I don’t “think” at all, or more accurately, I don’t “have thoughts.”

Its’…. a river of a questions answered in a rush — a wave, a slow moving swirl, a ripple, a rest in an eddy, a waterfall, a cascade, a dribble, burbling, babbling, trickling gutter flood of leaves and feathers and doors and faces … streaming.  

No preparation. If I think too much it gets self-conscious and it’s not so fun.

When I think, “I’m going to draw now,” I get a tingling in my stomach, and twirl in my heart. Like getting to be with someone you really, really love. 

Sometimes I’ll have an idea of something I want to draw and I’ll start with that. Like, body parts. A camel. And a girl with two braids in the air with faces in the tips of her braids. Then it goes from there. Repeat images happen all the time. Pockets, horses, elephants, trains, windows, doors. Lately, eyes within eyes, and I’m sure this has something to do with being in an introspective place.

Drawing like this, there’s the flush…

and then the river takes it away.

BIO

Wendy Wahman is a former staff artist for the Seattle P-I newspaper, and editorial illustrator who’s clients included the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, Boston Globe, and Harper’s Magazine. She is the author-illustrator of many children’s books, including, ”Don’t Lick the Dog,” which was a 2010 Bank Street Best Children’s Book of the Year, starred for Outstanding Merit, and accepted to the Society of Illustrators Original Art show.  Her improvisational drawings, “Wenderings,” are surreal dreamscapes with contemporary mythology.  To see more of them and watch how they are drawn, visit her instagram @wendywahman2

Wendy Wahman Works