Several months ago, writer Wendy MacNaughton from the Substack DrawTogether with WendyMac shared a project she was working on and invited volunteers to sign up to participate by duplicating her activity in their own towns. I just loved the idea so I signed up and awaited instruction. She explains the whole process here:
Basically you go somewhere busy and approach strangers to sit down and draw each other with blind contour drawing for one minute. The idea is to get busy, distracted people to slow down and look at someone else and connect with another human, face to face. I hoped to get an energetic extrovert to lead the operation at an art guild event sometime. Well, two days ago, I got an email announcing that Wendy had launched her #drawtogetherstrangers proposal and it was ready to go. Oh, and she wanted everyone to go out and do it on Sunday. Today. I told my daughter about it and she said, “Let’s do it.” I caught her at an uncharacteristically out going moment. She had been cooped up in a bird sanctuary all day and was craving human interaction. It was great luck for me.
This morning we gathered our supplies and went to the bustling metropolis of Summerville, South Carolina.
Sundays aren’t really that busy around here, but it was a beautiful day.
We set up our table and quietly waited. Pretty soon we realized we were going to need to work for this. The pedestrians were few and far between and almost always traveling in pairs. We broke the ice and grabbed a friendly looking couple. We acknowledged that we were breaking the rules because they were clearly not strangers but we asked them to be our guinea pigs and they obliged. I have a pretty big case of social anxiety, so the whole thing was painfully awkward. We couldn’t have picked a better first couple. They were so friendly and really seemed to enjoy the experience. That got us excited about the project and we enthusiastically approached a few more people and split couples up. We became the second stranger in the exercise.
I think the high point was when Harold and Harley spotted us and came in for a closer look. Harley (Harlequin) a cute little girl sat at our table and drew my trusty assistant. It was a great conversation starter. We looked around for another stranger to pair up with Harold, but had no luck so I asked Harold if he would like to try it with me. Sitting face to face, I stared into his jade green eye and followed the shape of his young face with my eyes and hoped my pen was keeping up. I nervously rambled with my broken internal monologue and noted that it really was something just looking at someone so closely that you don’t even know. He agreed. He told me I had pretty eyes. We both started on each other’s hair and I realized I had left him with no mouth. I slid my pen to where I supposed the middle of his face was and attempted a mouth. 3, 2, 1… our time was up and we looked at our creations. We all had a good laugh at the results. Young Harold, wise beyond his years, was absolutely in love with the whole process. He commented that it was not really about art, but more about connecting with people. I excitedly agreed. He said he thought it was great, especially nowadays with so many terrible things happening. (I thought to myself, that’s exactly what the creator of the project said.) Harold told us that he was also and artist and took a notebook out of his backpack and showed us several carefully drawn anime scenes. We talked for quite awhile and then he and his little sister went off to find their parents.
The day seemed to be slowing down. When the sun went behind some clouds and our energy started to wane, we decided we had done enough for now.
The whole project really was a great experience and I hope to try it again soon.
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