Untitled, 2009, by Laurie Fendrich

A few nights ago I had a dream in which my left hand had suddenly turned into a charcoal-broiled lump. I don’t need a shrink to interpret this one. The dream comes directly from the way my two tired hands feel right now. I draw with both my right and left hands (the left for filling in tone only). Having just completed 33 drawings in 30 days, my hands are exhausted. Instead of one of those lovely pairs of soft Hollywood hands — finished with a lovely white-tipped French manicure — my hands are raw and numb. The skin around the fingertips is stained with conté-crayon, and the nails are cracked and worn all the way down. My hands are not a pretty sight.

Anybody who’s read my posts over the past few weeks might have reasonably concluded that I’ve been doing nothing during my residency at the Dora Maar House other than drinking wine, musing on the origins of Cubism, and taking long walks. Actually, I’ve been working my little tail off. Somehow, the gloriously beautiful and sunny south of France spurred me to delve deep into the world of black and white abstraction.

Each morning, I headed into the limpid light of the studio, where I sat down and spent several hours drawing. (When I say “drawing,” I don’t mean depictions of what’s in front of me, but rather monochromatic abstractions done in a dry medium.) Yes, I looked up occasionally — to gaze out the window into the mountains in the distance. My head, however, was bent down monitoring my hands drawing. Each day I drew until that day’s drawing was finished.

Now, I’m not one of those processy artists — like the Abstract Expressionists, for example, for whom the emphasis was always on the artist’s state of mind while making art. Nor am I like the many artists in the 70s who insisted their art absolutely foreground the way in which it had been made. Me, I make art to be looked at for what it is at the end, and the only thing that counts for me is whether the art looks good. If it hurt my hands to make a drawing, or I was in a sad or bad mood while I made it, what do I care, as long as it turned out good?

There are a lot of artists who work with assistants. Although working in the studio is laborious for me, I always want to do everything, from turning on the lights to spraying and slip-sheeting the drawings, to taking out the trash (recyclables separated, of course).

My biggest challenge when drawing is to overcome the tension that comes from knowing that one careless stroke ruins a six-hour drawing. (I can’t erase conté on Arches stippled watercolor paper, and I don’t paint back in with white.) Drawing the way I do — building tones through layers, never smudging or erasing, and never adding white — requires a certain exactness and I get a little bit tense, particularly near the end of a drawing. Painting, by comparison, is relaxing. You can always wipe things out, scrape things down, and start over.

As I finished packing my 32 drawings today (I’m leaving one of them here as a token of gratitude to the Dora Maar House) to ready them for shipping back to New York, I felt a surge of anxiety. I’m entrusting this box to Fed Ex? Am I crazy? What if they lose my drawings? What if their tracking number leads to a dead end? What if a forklift accidentally spears the box? What if they drop the box in hot oil or boiling water? With my artistic sensibility, there’s no way that’ll be anything but bad, bad, bad, and no amount of consolation will make me believe that what matters the most is that I had a “wonderful experience.”

J.A.D. Ingres, one of the greatest drawers of all times, was also a teacher at L’academie Française. He famously said to a class of students, “We shall begin by drawing, we’ll draw some more and we’ll continue to draw.” In the fall I’ll be teaching drawing again, and I’ll be quoting him to my students. The good news is that they — not me — will be doing the drawing.