What We're Practicing

At one of the open mics I hosted in my apartment before we had the two Drawing Room spaces, a woman I didn’t know gave one of the most inspiring performances of the night. The poem she read, the emotion in it, the whole room was leaning in. I don’t exactly remember what the poem was about, but I found her afterward to tell her how much it resonated, and she mentioned she hadn't been planning to perform at all that night. She'd just come to watch.

I've been thinking about that ever since. She walked in with no intention of sharing, and something about the evening changed her mind. I remember feeling grateful in two directions at once: for her sharing the piece itself, and for what her deciding to perform said about the space, group and energy, and that an environment where sharing something unrehearsed, in front of strangers, felt almost normal. Most of what we do at Drawing Room was represented in that experience.

Part of why that night stayed with me is how rare it feels to watch an adult do what she did. Kids do it constantly. They notice what pulls at them, a stick, a puddle, a blank wall, and they act on it without needing a reason. Then they run to show someone. That instinct doesn't disappear as we grow up, but most of us haven't thought about ours in years. I recently described Drawing Room as a practice space. That instinct is what we practice.

The practice has three parts, and they happen in order. First you notice something, a pull toward a material, an idea, a thing you want to try. It shows up in your body before you have a reason for it. Then you choose to act on it, which takes a bit of nerve, even when it's just a brushstroke. Then you share it, sometimes that's you mid-attempt at something you've never tried, sometimes it's the finished piece hung on a wall. Notice, choose, share. Pretty much everything we run is some version of that loop.

The noticing is the part most people skip, because nothing in our adult life really requires it from us. Many of our sessions start with questions about you: one of your favorite objects, a daydream, or an overheard conversation that stuck with you. They're about you and what you noticed. If you stick with it for a few weeks, patterns start showing up. For example, you realize you've reached for the same three colors every session, and you start wondering what that's about. Or you notice you never touch the biggest paper. Or every piece you've made this month has a window in it somewhere. It doesn’t have to be a deep analysis, it’s more about learning to describe yourself to yourself. We explore this through conversation, but I’ve also learned that writing is the easiest way to make progress on this process. Not necessarily journaling, but something as easy as jotting down two lines on a nearby paper or in your notes app. What you noticed while walking or watching a movie. What intrigued you, what questions came up, what patterns you recognize about what you like to think about, maybe what you avoid, too. I started doing this at a dinner alone while traveling, then found myself doing it everywhere I went, and I was surprised how different a thought becomes once you've seen it written down. Nobody else ever has to read it. Over time you start trusting your own taste and your own voice, or at least getting curious about it.

The choosing happens while you make. Once you have a sense of what you're drawn to, you get to act on it, and I know my own list pretty well by now. In clay, I love making functional objects with lots of handmade details. Functional because I can’t let go of the productivity-inclined side of my brain, and handmade details because I want to justify hand-building versus using other tools. I like drawing and sculpting fast, without revisions. I love old, ornate things that make me wonder about the person carving every detail, swirly, puffy shapes, geometric tiles, and stripes (now you’ll start noticing this at Drawing Room spaces if you haven’t already). Nobody voted on any of that but me. It built up one small decision at a time, and every one of those decisions was a way of saying what I mean, to myself first. Everyone's version of this looks different, and it surfaces faster than you'd expect. Some people only want to make things they can give away. Some want ten quick attempts instead of one careful piece, or exactly the opposite. The list is yours, and making is how you find out what's on it.

The sharing is the part I knew was core to a practice long before I could explain why. What finally helped was realizing it's really two roles, not one. One one side, you put something forward: the unplanned reading, being in the middle of a project that’s not quite working out, or the finished piece framed at a showcase. And there's everyone else, witnessing. That second role sounds passive, but I don't think it is at all. Witnessing is noticing directed at another person, seeing what someone tried instead of ranking how it went. The woman at the open mic went up because the group had spent the whole evening showing her what the response would be. Her courage didn't come out of nowhere – that was built up collectively by the group. And the roles trade off. Whoever read tonight is clapping for someone else next week.

The sharing also grows as the weeks go on. Every season we encourage people to bring a friend, a partner, family to the end-of-season showcase, where both the finished pieces and the process work from all eight weeks are on display. It's often the first time someone sees their work framed and hanging on a wall. Moments like that are most of the answer to why Drawing Room is built the way it is. You can notice alone, and you can choose alone. Plenty of people draw at their kitchen table, and I hope they never stop. But there's no way to be witnessed alone. That part only happens with other people around, and it's why our tables seat eight and why a cohort moves through a season together.

I’ve always been really interested in languages, learning new ones, thinking about what I can say in one that I can’t in another. When I travel, I love trying to learn the basics of a new language, enough to order dinner and be briefly charming in one exchange. I think a practice is made up of many different languages too. You learn to hear yourself, then to say something with your hands, then to be understood by people learning the same thing. Which medium you do it in matters less than you'd think. Charcoal, clay, ink, words, a mic, they're all a bit like different dialects of the same thing, and people tend to find the one that fits them, sometimes by accident. We frequently see members trying materials they hadn't touched before, and end up building an entire practice around a medium they didn't originally come in for. What's underneath doesn't really change.

And like any language, fluency comes from use. A single evening is real, and plenty of people stay casual forever, dropping in when they feel like it. That's a completely good way to use us. But when you come back, somewhere around week eight, the noticing starts becoming second nature. What felt like courage in week one is just what you do and who you are. It's why we build seasons and not just events. You come in to practice something, and you leave with a practice.

Recently, a Journey member told me her biggest takeaway had nothing to do with technique. It was realizing that with repetition she could actually learn and improve at something, and that she could choose to do that with anything. She hadn't felt that way, she said, since she was a kid. People who've been with us a while say versions of this all the time, about how they travel, their relationships and work, how they think about what they want to do with their lives and their time.

If any of this makes you curious, drop by our Williamsburg and Midtown spaces where this is happening every day. Pop by to play with supplies in our Art Library, bring your own projects, play board games, read a book, lounge on couches, enjoy the air conditioning, and chat with people who are here for the same thing. No experience needed, no plan required. And if you’re ready to find your community and build your creative practice, our fall Journeys start in September.