Dean C. Graf's Uploads

These were drawn on different days, in different places. A salt shaker and sugar rack at Beans & Barley on Milwaukee’s East Side—a place that is gone now. A chair at Starbucks, which is still there. When I go places, I wait. Waiting is filled with observation. Observation is recorded with marks. Marks spark memory. I can look at a few pencil lines years later and remember where I was. Maybe that’s what a sketchbook really keeps. Not drawings of things, but evidence of moments. For Doodle Addicts, I would use this rather than making Beans & Barley the whole story. The loss of Beans & Barley gives one sketch poignancy, but your larger idea is better: drawing converts otherwise disposable waiting into memory.

A quick observational sketch from the chess meet—boards, pieces, and the strange architecture of waiting. The chessmen seemed to be rehearsing before the players arrived.

Two pens resting on the table, drawn quickly before they were put back to work. The lines wander and double back, but that is part of looking: an ordinary object becomes particular when we give it our full attention. Ink sketch from observation.

A marsh resists firm boundaries: water becomes ground, branches become reflections, and distance dissolves into light. The task was not to explain the place, but to remain attentive while it refused to become clear.

Ruskin believed that ornament was never decoration for its own sake — it was evidence of attention, a record of the hand and eye slowing down enough to truly see. These kaleidoscope name designs are built the same way: a name broken into line, repeated outward with discipline, until pattern becomes a kind of patience made visible.mandala, kaleidoscope, radial symmetry, pattern art, geometric art, name art, marker art, hand drawn, meditative art

Dancing figures. An exercise in motion and color.

Three things the morning never forgets.

Perched between silence and song, the blue jay waits—half mischief, half mystery.

Relaxed tension. Two parents at a national chess competition. Their kids squared off at the board, and so did they — one leaning back, shoe propped up, trying for calm; the other sitting stiff, watchful. The game played out in more ways than one.

The meal was my attempt to bring a little comfort into the rugged outdoors. The sketch was my reminder—to hold onto the moment, even when mosquitoes, ashes, and deflating air mattresses had other plans.

Sunday morning, more than a decade ago. Music, fellowship, and reports about what God was doing here and there. Some things are worth remembering. We learn from looking back— but we must live forward.

Imagine trading your soft bed for a deflating mattress. Imagine food cooked under ash, a fire that smokes more than it warms. Imagine waking at dawn with stiff muscles, yet finding yourself strangely alive. This sketch is not just about tents, cars, and campfires. It is about the in-between—where inconvenience and beauty wrestle, and something deeper sneaks in. Camping reminds me: comfort is overrated, but presence is priceless.

We are stitched together from fragments—torn edges, scraps, masks. The sketchbook shows only pieces, but grace sees the whole face.

The lake was busy with light, the grasses busy with wind, but the boat sat quiet against the shore. There is a gift in this tension: to be held still while everything moves, to be carried without effort, to find rest in the very heart of motion.

A simple ink sketch of a bird at rest. Sometimes the quiet moments—watching, pausing, waiting—are the deepest teachers. This drawing is part of my exploration of what I call the Quiet Practices—small ways of living from the inside out. If you’d like to see more of my reflections, I share them here: https://forming20.com/

Jury Duty, June 2013 Fifty of us sat in that room, each one staring at a phone or scribbling in a notebook, killing time. The lawyers asked their questions, picking us off one by one like a slow game of dodgeball. I wasn’t chosen, so I drew instead—earbuds, slouched shoulders, the hum of waiting caught in a few quick lines.

Super Nationals at the Gaylord—two rivers running through the lobby, actual boats gliding under glass ceilings, a nature center tucked between restaurants. Noise everywhere: kids, clocks, pawns and queens. Yet here, in the middle of it, a pause. A man leans back with the weight of waiting. A woman sits, at ease but still seeking. An empty chair remembers everyone who has rested there. In a place built to dazzle, what lingered with me was not the spectacle, but the silence. To draw is to honor the quiet within the clamor. thinking and seeing for better being — https://forming20.com/

Three trunks rising from one root, steady and separate yet belonging. The little bush at their base reminds me that life gathers in layers—quiet companions at the feet of giants. A simple contour line holds it all, the way a moment holds both strength and tenderness.

Sometimes wisdom comes in a joke, and sometimes laughter carries truth. Brian spoke like a sage, Mike answered like a friend, and together they held the room. We draw to remember. Not only the lines of faces, but the presence of goodness, the gift of voices that echo long after the chairs are empty.

So much noise presses in— screens, engines, endless chatter. But silence is not gone; it waits in a turned page, in breath, in light, in the hush between sounds.

A horizon of chalk—black sky heavy with silence, gold earth glowing with embered breath. Between them, a thin line of turquoise, the pause where one world ends and another begins. It is not sky, nor sea, nor sand alone. It is the threshold—a doorway, where silence teaches and light remembers. Stand here long enough, and you may hear it breathe. inking and seeing for better being — https://forming20.com/