What a pleasure to discover Elizabeth Perry. "I saw a lot of this staircase and interior," she says of her jury service last year.
"In December 2004," says Elizabeth Perry, "I decided to learn to draw by sketching something every day in a small journal." The result is her beautiful blog Woolgathering, where she posts one drawing or watercolor sketch each day.
The daily drawing is "a moment to pause and look around," she said one day recently. That's true for the viewer too when you see each drawing in the morning, but as a group, the drawings are more than that. They're a remarkable record of a thoughtful life, for one thing; the days bring humor, beauty, love, and on the day after the Virginia Tech shootings, grief. And they're a remarkable proof that a fleeting moment and a timeless truth are not opposite ends of a linear continuum. It turns out the continuum isn't a line but a circle, and Elizabeth Perry works where the two ends meet. Her drawings have a timelessness that seems to come directly from the evanescence of the moments she has chosen.
There is much more to Elizabeth Perry's work. There is her Museum Drawing Project:
From October 1, 2006, through June 30, 2007, I plan to visit the public spaces of the Carnegie Museum of Art and the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, every day the museums are open. I will draw something in a small sketchbook in response to my experience, and post that drawing to a new sketchblog, www.museumdrawing.com, with short written reflection or response.
There are her Pittsburgh drawings, of which this jury duty drawing is an example. They're posted at Flickr and at a group blog called Clusterflock. By training she is a writer, not an artist; she has written a children's book, Think Cool Thoughts
Many thanks to Elizabeth Perry not only for allowing her drawing to be used here, but for posting her Flickr work under a Creative Commons license that lets others use it too.
