Sketching in the Raw?

A raw sketch--is there such a thing? Now, the statement sketching in the raw takes on a meaning I hadn't thought about at first: sitting in a room in your birthday suit to write or to draw a sketch. . . . Of course, when I wrote that question, that wasn't what I was thinking. I was thinking about what to sketch and if there was really a raw sketch. A raw sketch, to me, is not knowing what you are going to sketch, not picking an item, just sitting down with a blank idea to write, like a free write. A raw sketch is a free write, right? Can a sketch be an argument with yourself? I could sketch about my fiance sleeping, my son's red car, the piece of trouble van I have, the for walls that surround me where I sit now. A sketch is about any single thing, moment, place, and so on and so on. Is sketching about a thought? Yes. Why can it not be. A sketch of my thought. What brought me here is the upcoming reading for my students. I've been attempting to find a way to use sketching as a tool for composing an argument paper. Can sketching be used? Sketch the argument. Sketch the subject. Sketch those involved with the subject. Sketch the area where the subject manner began as an argument. How can I show a sketch as a useful tool outside of writing a story? Did I use sketching to write academic essays? What is a sketch? Can the mini sections written for an essay be called a sketch. I often found myself writing different parts of an essay to find where I was going with my argument. I guess I did sketch. Does the writing world call that sketching or is sketching only for the story? No, it isn't for the story alone. Now, I ask, is an outline a sketch? I see sketching as detailed, finding the nitty-gritty of the place, thing, moment, etc. That is what I'm doing here right now.

My mind just jumped to Vincent. This blog started as an outlet for me to keep writing. Slowly it fell off as I found it more and more difficult to write about anything. I recall the hospital hall clearly because I did do a sketch. HEY! Sketching helps bring focus and allows for memory to have more clarity. Maybe this piece should be called Rambling Sketching. So, sketching is the raw is possible if I understand this process I just did, here, right now. Is a raw sketch a thought, the internal self of thinking about a question or situation? I think that is called brainstorming. I was brainstorming here. Where can I make this into a sketch? A raw sketch is writing the moment of writing as if viewing a surrounding or a person. A sketch about sketch is what--a raw sketch? Did I make up a term just to write?

Back to my thought: is sketching used in academic essay writing? Does this tool have the importance needed to make a big deal out of it for class? It is a very useful tool for the very first essay: Literacy Narrative--How Reading and Writing Experiences Established My Thoughts on Reading and Writing. The nitty-gritty of place in writing is. . . ? A person can sketch his / her thoughts about a subject. Don't argue about the thoughts, just write them down as "view" them. What does a person see? Make sure to step outside yourself once the thoughts are down. What comes out of those words that were written out on a piece of paper or typed out on the screen of a computer? Observe what is there, and observe the process. Sketching is "observing." I think I just answered the questions I have been asking. The answer is OBSERVATION.

I Came to Attempt a Sketch

I found myself coming to this blog and unable to write a sketch. As I read the last post, I realized my last attempt to write anything here was three years ago. At that time, I had one follower, who I can presume is no longer a follower because I have not been writing. Well, it doesn't matter because it is writing that is important in keeping this blog. There is no sketch tonight. There is only my presence for a brief time. One thing I know, sketching makes a world a different in my writing when I can get it out. Tonight, I do not feel like forcing it.

Night--HA, what is it? Night is dark but is it really? Night isn't always dark at the poles and Day isn't always light at the poles. What is night? What does night mean?

Just a passing thought.

Wow. since November of 2011!

It has nearly a year since I have been here. I haven't done much writing. My writing shut down on me as I went through the turmoil of my son's cancer / stroke, a beginning of a divorce, into the divorce and grown children being devastated. They needed someone to blame; I took the blame, still am. Well, my son's cancer is gone. One year survivor. He fights his stroke damage now. Much has changed, especially me. My past year is a novel in waiting. Through it all, I have returned to God in a most complete way. Of course, my children do not see it because they wish nothing to do with me. At least my grandchildren are seeing it, my colleagues are seeing it, my students are seeing it. If I was a visual art artist, the picture would begin in dull colors, colors of my life just before my son's cancer. Those colors would have changed quickly into grays and blacks with hint of dull and bright colors as I struggled with my son's illness and my personal emotional well-being, wondering why God could not change what I had been asking for before my son's illness and wondering why my son had to become ill during this time. The artist then would have changed the colors, slowly, very slowly, from the grays and blacks back to the dull colors with a few more brighter colors. As the canvas would be seven eighths filled by now, the last eighth saw the greatest change. The colors would be in their fullest strength, the gray and black so minute that there would be only dots, only a few, a handful. No, a change didn't come to keep the marriage together because the man didn't fill his pallet with colors. However, my colors, I hope, even though we are not together, will help him as he sees me differently--I can only hope. I do have to see the man who was once my husband once or twice a week due to my son. The canvas is overflowing and wanting to spread. God has done a good job, and has much more to do through me now.

Grace and Love to all. Hope I will be here more to give sketches!

Sketch Twenty-one

Rehabilitation Hospital:

I really don't want to do this sketch; I guess I will just put it out there. Vincent is sharing a room with me; I have a bed now. Alright, the room is long with one corner cut out for the bahroom. Not sketching the bathroom. Anyhow, the wall, where the beds snuggled up against, is blue; the other walls are cream on the bottom and an off gray on top. Of course the currents that all use in rooms such as this.

I can't do this. I want to sketch but I can't concentrate and I don't want to type up my surroundings. So, I'll force myself to just write anything, anything at all.

Anything: yepp; this may be nonesense. Nonsense is better than nothing. Oh, forgive any mispellings and any wrong forms of a word. Tired. The past six weeks, maybe longer, has drained this body greatly. With tomorrow Thanksgiving, I will sleep as late as I please--no schedule to keep! I feel as if I have been locked up in a jail for a very long time. My emotions are messy; messy emotions are hard to deal with. Did figure out that I have this emotional situation that someone finally named for me: "Out of Control." It isn't that I am out of control, it is that my home that once I managed is no longer in my control, no part of it, nor form of it, absolutely nothing. It goes much much further than that. This includes relationships. With a strained marriage already, a teenage daughter who is rebelling, a grandson who is soooooo upset with me for not coming home, I am a stranger in my own home. What will it be like when I return? I already do not feel comfortabel going home; it doesn't even feel right to call it home; I am homeless in the sense of "feeling" a home. This experience has brought much to my attention. Through it all, I have had a few good friends. Words of wisdom, and words of hurtful truth from each has allowed me to see where my future lies. I have a very hard road ahead. The most important part of this journey has been finding my place with God once again; God's grace has shown itself; God's voice has loudly spoken, "This is MINE, do not worry, I will take care of this, just live, love, pray, keep faith and hope, and share. This is MINE; take care of you as I help you; This is MINE." Yeah, I was yelled at two days ago while showering. Started my prayer, and not but a few seconds into it, I heard God yelling at me.  Ha ha, my parent was screaming at me; guess I hadn't been listening to well lately. So, now, I am taking care of me.

Sketch Twenty

This sketch is a sketch of feeling:

Night came. I fought.
No longer fight.
Close my eyes.
Complete the dark.

Sketch Ninteen

I am tremendously behind in my sketches; life is not slow for me; the hospital and my work (composition instructor) consumes me; I see the same walls too often as I sit in my office, stand in the rooms where instruction takes place, sleep in my son’s hospital room—instead of the hall now, look out the same windows daily, drive the time from hospital to home, home to hospital, hospital to work, work to hospital, make those errands between those drives, forget much of what work has to be done other than attending to my son’s emotional needs, being his support; I forget me often and others that need me as well; my hats are stretched thin; I see papers mostly, my son’s bed with him in it mostly; I know this isn’t a sketch per se, but it is the sketch of me currently; currently as I am; currently as I am and not wanting to be, attempting to fight all that eats me: My Lord Jesus Christ I pray every night falling asleep in the pray to wake in the prayer, letting that prayer take my dreams where need to be, an attempting to pray between every task that I do to allow me to find time for all others that are in need, and still find time for me. Once I was a prayer warrior, had forgotten, but this cancer—a cancer that attacks my son—has found a way to bring me back to those nightly long prayers. The me I had forgotten is returning; the me I once loved is returning; the me who knows how to fight is coming through; the demons shrug as I see more clearly, as I pray more daily; the demons know I will not run this time, I will not close myself off from God as I did before. Every night is a battle for me and a friend, for me and a family member, for me and some other I may just happen to meet. Pray; I say pray. I have found part of me again.

Sketch Sixteen

The Hall

In the hall of Lutheran Hospital, the hall that connects the third floor of the Orthopedics Hospital to the regular part of the hospital are windows on each side--large windows that a car can go through, windows that start two feet from the floor and stop two feet from the ceiling, windows that aren't divided by much except about every three to five, where a piece of wall jets out. The windows are situated much like window seats without a cushions. In this hall are three offices and a small boutique center, which is no longer in business. The offices and the empty boutique divide up one side of the hall, making a center nook, the place where I sleep in the evening. This is how the three offices and the empty boutique are arranged: The empty boutique and one office is placed closes to the regular hospital, the office down the hall. Some 30 feet is left for chairs and tables, the nook I mentioned, before the next two offices appear. After those offices, another open space where the windowed-wall cuts into the doors that lead to the Orthopedics Hospital. The offices, upon inspection one day, when noticing a door open, has the very same large windows as the hallway. Here, in the nook, a pocket of sorts, is my bedroom by night. The chairs and couches in this part of the hall are different from those in the other cubby hole area and the waiting are for ICUe, except for the chairs used around the tables. (I must stop this observation briefly to tell you about one conversation I can hear, one of many that becomes part of this hallway: much grief finds its way to this hall. An older gentleman with a midlife women pass me to stand in front of the empty boutique. She begins to cry, he pats her back, in a hug I suspect, but I can hear the light patting; whispers and whimpers persist. There is much of this here; and still there is laughter as families meet, coming to know grief, often over an older person, not the young--the young are few here.)

Back to those windows; they intrigue me. The large windows allow vision to the construction of the main hospital, a fifth floor addition. Sometimes I imagine the crane not functioning correctly, the items upon its lift smashing through the hall. Here, it is quieter, even during the day, less traffic, even when the carts come barreling through with equipment and people walking to and from each hospital. The waiting room is always full, the elevator always busy.

As I attempt to finish this sketch, I am not in the hallway. I cannot honestly recall the wall colors. I can see the pattern in the chairs: the green and green blue colors. As vivid as I think the pattern is in my mind, as often as I have it, I'm without words to describe it because it is not in front of me. At a glance, from memory, a person can assume it is camouflage, which I say it is, but the pattern . . . I must see it, is not truly leaves and twigs--or is it. I've yet to determine if there is a genuine pattern with all the times I have stared at it. (Again grief can be heard as I sit alone in the hallway, sit on one of the couches that make up my makeshift bed late at night; a man talking to a brother, a sister, I do not know who, but someone who comes across as family by the way he speaks. His mother has been sent her from St. Joe. The situation is not good. She has been made more ill by the actions taken at St. Joe. His anger doesn't override his grief, but his voice speaks the pain of negligence, of lawsuit. The many different issues that bring us here.)

I have made time to write while in the hallway. My makeshift bed all tore down, I sit looking about me. The walls are a dirty cream, not quite a tan with a peach tint. Those chairs--let me get to them in a moment. The floor is carpeted: green mainly, a dark green, probably a hunter green with a cream and barn red in a splattered patterns highlighting the greens. This carpet comes in a darker type pattern as well, which creates a square outline in some areas of the hall--well this one is rectangle. Now for the chairs and couches: a person can witness leaves and twigs, but the lay out of the pattern is very deceptive because squares come in--some squares have tattered edges. There are a few vines with leaves at the tips, but don't stand out. The colors of this pattern also throws a person off: slate gray, off-dirty white, three to four tones of green with a blue hint in them. The couch pattern I've stared at mostly develops its own character, an entity, as if it shifts shapes, moves as if uncomfortable with its being: an eye within a jaw, the jaw jetting out sharply like that of a broken skull where the jaw protrudes. This same pattern repeats, but because of its position on this couch it stands alone.

There are two coffee tables in here; all the tables are alike among the three areas. The top is bordered by light colored wood, the same wood used for the legs (and beneath most likely). It feels like polished compressed wood. The top itself might be formica, a tan, brown mixture of colors in a splattered-marbled pattern.

Oh, those chairs have wood along the back and the cushions are divided by the same wood, making the couches look like individual seats, three side by side. The couches and chairs are wood framed benches of sort.

On one wall hangs a TV--LG; a light switch at the edge of this wall (this is the wall against the centered offices). Across from it, on the other wall, hangs a picture. Until now, I have not noticed it, I have not paid attention to it, nor looked at it.

I will not be finishing this sketch unless my son is placed back into ICU. He has moved to the regular part of the hospital, meaning he is better. There is much more to sketch.