Left hand, right hand, both hands

The smog here in Paris has dissipated a little bit today, though we have had a week of Angelenos suffocation, pearly pink air obscuring the Eiffel Tower, even from just across the Seine on the Right Bank.  Paris, in general, is a luckily situated city, very temperate climate, as compared to say New York, where winters can be arctic and summers asphalt tropical.  So it comes as no surprise that the City of Lights has found no good way of dealing with the pollution apart for making the subway and buses free for all for three days.  If the French were more Scandinavian, they would have closed off the city to most automobile traffic years and years ago.  Unfortunately, they are not "puritan" and treasure their liberties too much to submit to that kind of draconian environmentalism.

I mentioned a while back that being dissatisfied with myself, I had "become" left-handed.  It was a strange decision I made while I was in Florence, Italy, for some reason, I decided that the only way to be "special" was to become left-handed.  I've come to question my then adolescent-mind quite a bit now, but that kind of draconian "flip" was how I function (-ed ?).

I write about this today because a strange thing happened at the nude model drawing session that I attend in town.  I have been traveling a lot the past few weeks and had not attended the sessions for a while.  A really strange thing happened, in that well into the first hour of the three hour session, I realized that I was drawing with my left hand.  This in itself is not a very special thing as I have done so for a very long time, but I am usually conscious of it.  Moreover, for the past few years, I have mainly used my right hand to draw.  So it came as a surprise to me to find that I had nearly completed most of the "big moves" with my left hand and all that without a conscious decision to do so.

There is something different in this.  I can't pinpoint exactly what it is, but it is perhaps a sign of finding a comfort zone, being less stressed, being more confident?  It is apparent to me that there must be something of that sort going on as when I am "left-handed" nowadays, it is when I am more relaxed, more "in the flow" of things, and not stressed.  My right hand takes over otherwise.

The drawing from today's session

The drawing itself is not very different from all the other ones I do at the sessions.  I have been doing these graphite nude studies over and over again, some more finished than others, but all rather too sober and serious.  I hear things like, "Oh, you're so patient" all the time at the sessions.  If I remember correctly though, today is the first time since I attended these sessions in March of 2011, that I drew with my left hand and unconsciously at that.  

A drawing from two years ago (2012)

When I was doing my MFA, we had nude drawing sessions that Bonnie Sklarski had the school pay for.  We were a group of five to ten and I made nude studies in pastel on rabbit-skin glue primed masonite boards, all done with my left-hand.  I don't think that I have done any nude model studies with my left hand since I left Bloomington.  

All this to say that something has happened, and I will try to figure out what exactly.