Fear of blank pages

my ongoing struggles with painting and drawing

I’m not a ‘natural’ when it comes to drawing and painting. I utterly loathed art at school, always feeling humiliated by the appalling tosh I always turned out from those classes. Something in excess of forty years on, I still feel that way much of the time when I look at what I’ve produced, but I love doing it enough to persist in the face of that feeling.

After a couple of years of enthusiastic but undisciplined practice, I have managed to get to the point where I feel able to produce a halfway decent picture…

…but at the cost of what I think is an over-careful approach, and I’m keen to get away from monochrome. In my current frame of mind, I personally prefer these quick sketches, sneaked in a doctor’s waiting room, incomplete and inaccurate though they are…