(6/100) From One Extreme to the Other.

Today I was procrastinating, doing unnecessary things to avoid getting to my art, and I began to realise why - because I was so unhappy about the work I did yesterday and I was afraid of doing it again.  Instead of making art I spent time 'researching' about Jim Morrison and discovered what an interesting artist he was.  I noted down some quotes attributed to him.  But it was still procrastination.  As soon as I understood what I was doing to myself, I got to my sketchbook and made another attempt at the portrait, this time in pencil, but although I think there is some improvement from yesterday it is still another failed drawing, but I don't feel so bad about it today.
So why am I finding this so difficult? I have some possible answers. 1) The image I'm working from is very poor and very small.  I can't enlarge it because it's from a video. 2)  Working flat at the table puts it out of perspective, causing the face to be longer and narrower than it is.  3) Trying to 'copy' accurately and get some kind of likeness makes for a stilted unexpressive drawing. 4) the slightest millimetre of wrong placement of line or tone alters the whole look, (this meant I spent an inordinate amount of time fiddling trying to correct miniscule wrongly placed marks. 5) I'm not very good at drawing!  
So what to do?  Obviously I need a lot more practice, but also there was something, some emotional response to the look I saw that was briefly captured on film that I was trying to recreate but I wasn't able to do it by working from the video image. I could perhaps forget about the original image and work  from what I've learned by doing these drawings, and looking to my inner  vision instead.  It seems there is something in me that needs to find the way to convey not only what I saw, but what I felt.  I  think I AM learning, so I want to persevere with this.

'There are things known 
and there are things unknown,
 and in between are the doors.'
Jim Morrison

After this my 30 minute painting session was spent daubing paint with my fingers over a very bad painting, completely obliterating it and finding relief in letting it happen, letting it be ugly, letting it be paint.  Thank you to Louise Fletcher for the challenge to make a deliberately ugly painting,  but the ugly painting was the one underneath, this one is far  more interesting.  No trying, no thinking, just painting.