In the years before you or I, they would sit hunched over the lights of aging candles. Hands steady and eyes intensely focused, all while visually tracing the outer edges where deep shadows rolled off onto soft specular highlights. Back and forth. The translation between model and sketch seemed natural. Unquestionable, even. But today, my old friend, the game has changed. No longer is real life the muse of the artist. The soft glow of oil lamps are gone and our eyes trace photographs and projected slides instead, not living specimens. The grade of who succeeded and who failed is based on the accuracy of the copy. Did you know they even teach this in the universities and colleges? Rubbish…

Truth be told, and strictly between you and I alone, I always took issue with both artistic approaches. To create a sketch, a beautiful, breathing entity, to produce something from nothing…it is a process wholly unparalleled elsewhere in our lives. But to trace or copy these lines from another source? To create something from something else? That transcends simple plagiarism. It violates the freedom and spirit of art to begin with.

Models move. Poses shift. Sure, you can approximate it, fake it. You can extrapolate between where the shoulder was yesterday and where it lies today. You can scrutinize every inch of that photograph in your attempt to recreate it on paper. But when you step back, you put down the charcoal and things still don’t feel right. And while you ponder why, all frustrated and vexed, the answer is simple: you were trying to copy something that cannot be duplicated. What washed up on the other side is a pale mimeograph of the original, with no life or personality injected. You were so focused on copying the lines of the master in order to have that masterpiece of your own that not a single second was spent trying to make it yours. You were aiming at forgery. Not creating.

Life is not a snapshot. It is not a model sitting unnaturally still. It is not meant to be frozen or paused for our study and analysis. That’s the tragic beauty of it. And ultimately it is unfair of either of us to expect that life should imitate the ideal simply because we have that singular picture in our head that we’re striving to quickly copy down.

I know, they teach us this when we’re in elementary school. With questions of dream jobs and future plans, it sometimes seems as if every adult is merely trying to get us to lock down our destiny before we even hit puberty. They want us to have that picture, that snapshot, that Poloroid of The Life™ that we’re aiming for. And you know what? We go for the ride. Part nature and part nurture, we mature thinking that The Life™ we have pictured in our heads is what we’re aiming for. Two kids. Two cars. $50k in the bank by 25 for retirement. Each choice is labored over, not for what feels right but rather for what gets us closer to The Life™. Missed turns even become death sentences as we watch our view of The Life™ move further away.

Please know that I point no fingers, because I am just as culpable as you. But do promise me that we won’t let each other slip back into that. We can’t go back to thinking that this life is some static, unchanging picture that can be simply copied in the ideal in order to create the ideal. Remind me tomorrow, remind me next month that this is about the process, the journey, the act of sketching that picture and not the picture itself. To hell with the model and the photograph. If we come out on the other side with dead and lifeless final renderings it’s because we forgot to put ourselves in it. And I don’t want that, for either of us.

So put down the photo. Turn away from the model and switch off the projector. From now on, no more copying for you or I. They can’t tell us what’s right. This is life in free-form.