The dog, the cat, and the bird

This time our drawing will be dedicated to animals. The dog, the cat, and the bird. It has a lot to do with your inner attitude, with your quality while drawing. Maybe this deeper level of drawing seems unimportant to you at first. But still these thoughts influence you when you’re drawing, and we absolutely need them. So, choose one of these animals. If you can’t do anything with the dog, choose the cat. Or the bird that sings and warbles in the summer and whistles an evening song on the balcony for you every day.

I would like to start with the dog. The dog is an animal very close to man. First and foremost, it’s a loyal animal. A dog, if it has a good relationship with its owner, is a faithful creature. Now we can apply this to the inner dog within us. The inner dog can mean loyalty to yourself. This loyalty is something that deeply belongs to you. What you’ve developed in a drawing, the wonderful lines, the new ideas, the new solutions for composition, the struggles that have sometimes accompanied you during the process, all of this is only possible when you’re loyal to yourself. When you trust yourselves, have faith in yourselves and stay true to yourselves. There are so many influences, especially in the visual arts. You see so much; you hear so much. Through the media you learn about artists who are successful with a certain method.

What makes these artists stand out? They do their own thing. Not that they’re always the very best artistically, I would sometimes doubt that. But we’re in a situation where we experience a call to be true to ourselves and to what we can develop from within. To not always look around to see if this or that is successful or fashionable. This inevitably happens anyway; we can hardly stay away from these thoughts or influences. But the unique and the authentic, that we can only draw from our inner being.

This already brings us to a quality that is characteristic for the cat. The cat says, “This doesn’t bother me at all.” It has great self-will. So, I wish you the loyalty of a dog, but also self-will in the quality of the cat. So that you say to yourselves, “I know what I want. I’ll try this out, I’ll allow myself that now. I dare to do that, and I want to dare to do that. I’m doing this now of my own accord.” I would like to make two suggestions from art history at this point, and mention Eugène Delacroix from the 18th century and pictures of wild cats by Luc Tuymans from the 21st century.

Then we have the power of the bird, which represents spiritual and intellectual freedom. The freedom to dare to be self-willed and to be true to yourselves. To go into spiritual freedom and still stay with yourselves. There are several enchanting representations of birds in the history of art – look for them, find them! As examples I’d like to mention here the owl of Albrecht Dürer or the kingfisher of van Gogh.

Try to implement the qualities of these three animals in your drawing. If you want to make a dog: the dog has of course many different facets. There are many breeds of dogs and different qualities a dog can have. There are guard dogs and lap dogs, dogs that are not at all suitable for guarding, because they’re quite too sweet. Dogs that have a particularly well-trained nose, which is specialized for sniffing for money, or drugs, or weapons. Or avalanche dogs, they are very good at sniffing, too. Which dog it should be, which breed, you know best yourself. This is also something very personal.

A lot is possible through the external shape of the dog, the size, the fur. The fur of the dog, or the cat, too, and the feathers of the bird, that’s where all the emotion is. There’s not much facial expression in the face. The eyes, the muzzle, the ears, they are of course distinctive, but it’s mainly the fur that determines the appearance. Is it a shaggy coat, a soft coat, is it short haired or long haired?

You can determine all this for your dog. Is he sleeping, is he awake, is he alert, is he comfortable, is he running, jumping, or sitting, is he reaching his paw or just standing there? You can decide on all of this yourself. There are many role models, you can draw inspiration on them. There’s the wonderful dog of Dürer, or the dog of David Hockney, which he has drawn again and again. You can also look for dogs on the Internet, that have already been drawn by great masters, to make it easier for you.

Especially for those of you who’ve never drawn a dog, a cat, or a bird, just try it. I wish you a beautiful, intimate engagement with the qualities that these animals symbolize. Especially with the dog, the loyalty to yourselves. That you don’t squint at the drawings of others, but focus on your inner self, on your strengths and your qualities, on your wonderful talents. On your love for art and drawing and the world, and this empathy that comes with it.