As part of my “be the person you want to find” self-improvement campaign, I’ve been focusing on my artistic side (mostly writing). I know I’m drawn to artistic types, writers, visual artists, actresses. One woman I’ve been talking to has shared some of her abstract paintings – I like them. Even if it doesn’t go anywhere, I’d consider buying one. The other day she shared a drawing her son had made.
I can remember being a little kid and doing similarly detailed things. I love that it has a spear making room with a grindstone and sparks flying. It is universally what we might expect from a kid drawing a warship. I can remember being obsessed with drawing the ship from Star Blazers – drawing the wave motion gun, and the turrets. By the time we become adults, this creativity often fades in to the background, or gets lost to how it should be done Bogged down by realism our imagination slowly disappears.
Yesterday an article came across my feed about an early drawing (14th Century) of Venice.
I thought about the two pictures – maybe it was the ships that made me think there was any comparison… but I started to think about representation of things and the evolution of art. At one point, someone invented new techniques that became the standards for representation….at some point, someone “discovered” shading and depth, at some point, someone “discovered” perspective (Raphael gets a lot of credit for vanishing perspective in his “School of Athens”).
Trying to write about any of this shows me how little I know about the subject (or any subject). It’s probably best attempted as a poem, where I can play without the burden of fact. I’m trying to imagine what the artist who had never seen shading and perspective was thinking when he or she was trying to create a more realistic, three-dimensional form. Their eye saw what everyone else’s eye saw, but they knew they could capture it differently.
Brief excursions like this – thought experiments without really diving in to it (I could pick up several books on the topic – I won’t – see my posts about time) remind me of a project I was looking to start years ago when I worked in publishing. It was probably in the mid 90s and I started an email conversation with two women from New York who were thinking of a similar project. We were talking about a publication that would be called Dilettante – shallow explorations of just about anything… (see Huffington Post, Slate, or any of the other sites that are wide-ranging and of general interest). Some days, I feel like I need to go back and re-read Kerouac and crew… professional vagabonds, dharma bums to the fullest. It’s been getting a little harder to write these past few days. I’m realizing that I need other stimulants, a different type of mental fodder. I’m hoping to practice honing in on something, practice deeply observing the world around me, connecting dots between different points of interest, finding intersections…. drawing new ships, complete with spear rooms and the sparks of creation flying off the grindstone of practice.