Attention to detail

DSC04801_09-04-2017

I was watching “Whisper of the Heart” (耳をすませば) with my daughter. It was a rare case where she had seen the movie before, and I had not. So she was happy to give lots of spoilers: she would explain which character was good, which was evil, which two would fall in love together, etc.

It’s a great positive movie, and thought, what makes it so special and fun to watch? What makes all Miyazaki’s movies special? What makes Japanese things special, for that matter?

I think it’s attention to detail.

Studio Ghibli’s animation is decidedly not photo-realistic, but the details of the plot, of the characters’ interactions and of the drawings are incredibly intricate. “Kiki’s Delivery Service” and “My Neighbor Totoro” are some of my daughter’s (and my) favourite movies. Sometimes, it seems that the details are all there is in these films – there is no clear overarching “moral of the story”. In “Totoro” in particular, it seems like nothing is happening in the plot. We are just looking over the shoulder of a family that is living its everyday life. But of course, this very everyday life of the two girls and their parents is full of magic. It’s just that the adults are not seeing it. So in these movies too, the magic is in the details that are right before our eyes.

For me personally, working on small details is the best part of any project. When I paint, take photos, practice kendo, teach or do research, nailing down the nuances is where fun is. Stages like overall initial planning and making sure the details fit together in the big picture are necessary, but they are not so enjoyable.

DSC07069_09-30-2017

DSC05033_09-06-2017

What can you draw in 5 minutes?

Wolf_and_cub

Today, my daughter made me an offer I could not refuse: “Let’s do an exchange: I’ll draw a picture for you, and you draw one for me.”

I thought it would be an interesting challenge: what could I draw in five minutes or less? (Because that’s about how long it takes her to draw one of pictures.)

One of my favourite ways to procrastinate is by not staring doing something because I would convince myself that I either don’t have enough time to do a proper job or don’t have the right tools/environment/fill-in-the-blank. This time, I had my iPad already open, so I thought, alright, game on.

I was given some creative direction, of course. My daughter wanted a picture of a she-wolf and her cub, “but not a scary one”.

The process and the result are below. I used ProCreate for iPad and Apple pencil.

An by the way, I did lose the challenge, because she made two picture in the time it took me to do one.

Creative patterns

DSC05473_09-23-2017
At the art studio where my daughter goes on weekends, there is an impressive balance between order and messiness. I think that this combination is important for cultivating creativity, while at the same time developing skills that can be realistically applied in real life.

I haveve recently read about it in Steven Johnson’s “Where Good Ideas Come From”. One of his main points is that you need to be organized, but only up to a certain point: “…write everything down, but keep your folders messy;..”

The environment of the art studio is a perfect example of this – you can see that the tools and materials are treated with respect, yet making mess is not only tolerated, but even encouraged to a certain extent. Seeing this all around makes me want to create mess art of my own.

DSC05474_09-23-2017

DSC05475_09-23-2017

Splatters!
Splatters!

A new orbit

I have overheard an expression regarding a sphere of someone’s interests: “being pulled into a new orbit,” which I think is a near-perfect analogy of how our children expand our horizons. It resonated with my own experience, and I was compelled to draw this cartoon to illustrate it.

Orbit2

The analogy goes like this: when you don’t have children, you have a familiar sphere of interests, which develops under various influences throughout your life. If you were a planet, this would be your personal orbit, shaped by your parents, friends, teachers, and other “celestial bodies”.

Then, a major cosmic event occurs, and you have a child. Paraphrasing Neil Armstrong, it might be a small step for mankind, but a giant leap for a man (or a woman).

At first, this child is like your satellite. Her life revolves around yours. But as she grows, her interests and inclinations shape what you are interested in as well. You are being pulled out of your orbit. This implies a certain level of instability, so it can feel unnerving and uncomfortable. But even if you don’t settle into a new (wider and more exciting) orbit and instead get slingshot into the space, think about the alternative – going around and around along a familiar path year after year. So have no worries and enjoy the ride. Maybe that is the reason we have kids – so they can shake our universe apart.

Orbit

Here is my personal example. I studied art as a child, and have been painting occasionally in my adult years, in addition to doing photography. I think that might have affected my daughter’s early interest in art. Now, next to her, my own sphere of artistic interests is expanding. We now sketch and paint together regularly, and I even took a sculpture class last fall – my first art class since the high-school years. Isn’t it wild? I think it is.

DSC05668

Swords and pencils

“It is said the warrior’s is the twofold Way of pen and sword, and he should have a taste for both Ways.”
Miyamoto Musashi

DSC07219_05-06-2017

A katana, or any Japanese-style blade for that matter (as well as some Middle-eastern blades like in the image above), is similar to a pencil in terms of the principle of its physical construction.

Both a blade and a pencil have hard materials at their core (a katana can have many layers of different hardness, but the general principle is to have a hard metal surrounded by a softer one). For the pencil, it’s the graphite, and for the katana, it’s the steel with high carbon content. For both instruments, the hard core forms the working part, which can be sharpened to a fine point/edge.

DSC05279-2_01-30-2017

The hard core is enclosed in a relatively soft material – wood in the case of the pencil and low-carbon steel in the case of the sword. Without the outer set shell, neither instrument would be practical to use, because the core it too brittle to withstand the pressure of the artist’s hand or a strike of an enemy’s sword. Likewise, a soft, mono-layered instrument without a core would be a compromise at best in terms of cutting/drawing quality. Think about a bronze sword or a crayon – neither is particularly strong, and neither can be sharpened to a fine point or edge.

DSC06834_04-29-2017

A pencil that we use today is a European invention. Hand-carved wooden holders with graphite core were first made in England in 1564, and a Czech company Kohinoor patented and mass-produced pencils that were very similar to modern ones in the 19th century.

Europeans also made multi-layered blades, but the technique was refined and taken to the level of an art in Japan in middle ages.

I find it curios how these tools from two unrelated fields of application (cutting and writing) evolved along similar design paths, because in both fields similar qualities are valued – sturdiness and ability to be sharpened.

DSC07216_05-06-2017

Modern art

DSC00467_04-01-2017

My wife and I are getting exposed to some weird modern art through our five-year-old daughter’s interests. Back in Victoria, one of her first lessons at the 4Cats art studio was based on the works of Andy Warhol. I should mention that my wife is not a fan of Warhol, to put in gently, and at some point we used to have heated discussions about whether the world had collectively gone mad in regarding him as a great artist (of course, recent developments in American politics have re-defined the notion of collective delusion and put arguments about art into perspective). Then, our daughter had another series of lessons based on the art of Roy Lichtenstein and Gustav Klimt. To be fair, the curriculum at 4Cats was balanced in that it also had a session on Leonardo da Vinci, Claude Monet and Mary Cassatt.

Another favourite artist of our daughter’s is Wassily Kandinsky. In her school back in Canada, they used to paint ‘Kandinsky’s circles’ in the art class, so she was delighted to see a reproduction of the ‘Squares with Concentric Circles’ on the wall in our rental apartment here in Milan. When we saw an advertisement that a Kandinsky’s exhibit was coming up at Museo delle Culture, she was really looking forward to it.

It is fascinating, how some information about the artists and their styles of work trickles down into a five-year-old’s mind. To go to the Kandisky’s exhibit, our daughter wanted to wear her brightest-coloured dress. Quite appropriate.

DSC00382_04-01-2017

I studied art history when I was in school, but Kandinsky’s art has never been my interest. Now, because of my daughter’s fascination with his bright colours and stylized figures, I am re-acuanting myself with his work. It is also insightful to learn about the strong influence of Kandinsky’s Russian roots on his art through the prism of our own Russian heritage. Although my daughter and I look at it from two very different perspectives, both in terms of our age and our exposure to the culture, it is something that binds us. I hope that she sees it when she grows up, as I see it now.

DSC00463_04-01-2017

Kandinsky’s late work is sometimes jokingly described as child-like. I remember a scene from “Double Jeopardy”, where Tommy Lee Jone’s character, Travis Lehman, asks, pointing at a Kandinsky’s painting: “Those are nice pictures there. Did your kids do them?” When I look at my daughter’s drawings inspired by it, I can see why this is a cliche. The apparent similarity is a perfect illustration of the process of deliberate simplification that great artists like Kandinsky or Picasso go through. They converged on “child-like’ expressions not because they lack technical prowess, but because they eliminated all unnecessary elements in their art. In the case of a child, the process is very different, even if the results appears similar. She lacks the ability to include everything that she would like in her drawings and therefore settles only on the essentials. In other words, a five-year-old is limited by her technique, while the masters have come full circle to transcend the technique.

DSC00459_04-01-2017

Hedonic adaptation to sabbatical

DSC06727_02-20-2017-Edit-Edit

The human ability to quickly become used to dynamically changing surrounding conditions, which is known as Hedonic adaptation, is extremely useful in the evolutionary sense. It makes us resilient to adversity. On the other hand, it can easily rob us of enjoying the positive experiences.

Here is how Hedonic adaptation works, step-by-step, in the case of enjoying (or not) an academic sabbatical:

  1. My last class is over. I have no teaching or administrative commitments for the entire year. I can chose exactly what I will work on every day. It’s positively fantastic!
  2.  Things get even better: I travel to Milan, together with my family, for the second half of the sabbatical. “Wow, six-months in Italy! Sounds like something straight out of a romantic novel!”, says an acquaintance, and I agree. Milan is a beautiful city. There is a lot see and do in addition to all the exciting work I get to do with my Italian colleagues.
  3. After a couple of months, things get better still: We discover more places to see and things to do, as we explore Milan and its surroundings.
  4. And here comes the catch: the sabbatical itself, the freedom to do whatever I wanted every day that initially excited me so much, is not so exciting anymore. It becomes an expectation, something that is taken for granted. What is enjoyable now are all the things that are bundled on top of the sabbatical: delicious Italian food, museums, La Scala, the lakes, the mountains,..

I notice that Hedonic adaptation happens with nearly everything that we do. It is particularly devastating when accomplishment comes into play, when achieving a certain result becomes the expectation.

DSC06543_02-20-2017

I watch my five-years-old daughter learning to draw, and I see the tremendous excitement of just being able to express herself on paper: “I can draw anything I want! And I can use whatever colours I want, because it is my drawing!” Then, at some point as we mature, we learn too draw better: “Great! Now, not only I can draw whatever I want, but I can draw it in a way that it actually looks like the object I wanted to draw!” Then, things get better yet: “I can draw things in a way that other people like them! (I must really be an artist now!!)” And here is the trap: it’s no longer the drawing itself that is enjoyable, but the external approval that comes with it…

So, what do we do? Is the trap of Hedonic adaptation unavoidable?

Perhaps, some people are in more danger of falling into it than others. It is easy to become used to a nice environment, develop expensive or extravagant tastes, become addicted to approval… I think that our ability to resist Hedonic adaptation comes down to awareness. In any case, appreciating our current life situation, whatever it happens to be on the absolute scale of “niceness”, and being conscious about the effects of Hedonic adaptation is a healthy practice.

DSC06835_02-20-2017-Edit

Using colours

DSC06508_02-20-2017

My daughter likes drawing. We brought her colored pencils, markers, crayons and watercolors with us to Milan, and she has been using it gen at every opportunity. She even sketched sculptures in museums and churches. My wife and I are both delighted and a bit surprised, because this kind of drawing requires genuine concentration, which we don’t generally expect from a five-year-old.

Naturally, we are encouraging her interest as much as we can. In fact, it is easy to do, because there is a nice confluence between her and my interests. Lately, I also have been working on getting back to drawing – I use sketching as a memory-training exercise.

I have my own set of pencils and greyscale markers, and my daughter is always delighted when she gets to borrow them. However, grey is not a very useful colour, when one’s main subjects are princesses and unicorns. Still, she naturally wants to reciprocate and always asks if I would like to borrow her colourful markers.

DSC07752_03-04-2017

This past Sunday, she offered her markers again, and she also said that it would make her particularly happy if I used as many of the colours as possible. My initial impulse was to say “Thanks, but no thanks”, but then I decided to consider this as a creative challenge. In fact, using as many colours as possible is the opposite to restricting one’s palette, which is a common creative technique.

So, as a reference for my sketch, I chose a photo that I took the day before at the Carnival Ambrosiana. On it, my daughter is throwing a handful of confetti into the air. Here is the result – I satisfied the condition of using a whole bunch of colours in a single drawing!

DSC08025

Sketching as memory training

At the park.
At the park.
One of the nice things of being on sabbatical is that I can try new things and new ways of doing old things without the fear of missing out on productivity. My rationalization is that since I am operating in a new environment anyway, it makes sense to let go of the daily routines, on which I typically depend.

A new thing that I am experimenting with now, while leaving in Milan, is sketching. This is not an entirely new activity for me, because I have been drawing and painting various things on and off for the past few years and I studied art during my school years.

This time, I am doing it in a more deliberate way. To be more precise, what I am doing is purposeful practice, in Anders Ericsson’s sense of the term. Deliberate practice would have included feedback from a teacher, whom I don’t have. Specifically, I am working on sharpening my observational skills, both in terms of the speed of capturing the salient features of the subject and in terms of the depth of observation.

Not to compare myself to Leonardo da Vinci, but Milan once was his stomping ground. He even put “draw Milan” in his now-famous to-do list. Also, Leonardo was arguably the most keen observer, who has ever lived. So I thought it would be a shame not to use the opportunity to follow in his footsteps.

First, I started sketching by using my photographs as references. My goal was to focus on a particular aspect of the photo and to capture the mood of the scene. I’ve done this type of drawing before, both digitally and using physical media, so I my goal was just to get into the habit of drawing regularly.

At the park.
At the park.
Last Sunday, I tried something different. I took my sketchbook to the park, where my daughter went to play on a sunny afternoon. At the park, I sat on the bench and sketched the parents, who were watching their children, talking on their phones, chatting to each other, etc. I wanted to capture the gestures, without focussing on the proportions, lighting, composition, etc. I found that it was quite easy to sketch people, who were just standing and sitting around, even though they periodically changed their poses. On the other hand, I had a hard time sketching people, who were walking by or cycling past me. There was just not enough time to capture the essential elements of their poses, before they were gone.

I think the speed of gathering the essential visual information is a trainable skill, though. My hypothesis is that the challenge is related to the limited capacity of our short-term memory. A visual image of a human figure, particularly in motion, contains a lot of information: proportions (e.g. width to height) of the body, relative angles of the shoulders, ribcage, pelvis, positions of the hands and feet, silhouette (including elements of clothing), lighting/shadows, etc. We can capture all of this information in one glance (probably, in less than two seconds), but cannot recall it when we need to reference it during actual drawing. On the other hand, the capacity of human long-term memory is nearly unlimited. In any case, it is certainly trainable. The limitation is that information cannot be committed to the long-term memory quickly. In my particular case of sketching passer-bys, my subjects were leaving the scene before I could memorize their poses.

Napoleon.
Napoleon.
So, my plan of improving the speed of observation is to follow a particular pattern when looking at the subjects:
1. Width-to-height ratio of the body.
2. Body angle.
3. Position of the limbs.
4. Silhouette.
5. Shadows.

Then, when sketching, I would follow the same pattern to recall this information.

Hopefully, with some training, I would be able to scan through the elements 1 – 5 more than once. This should enable me to account for the changing scene, lighting and poses. Actually, cycling through a pre-defined sequence of elements of the scene is an established attention-aid technique. It is used in teaching defensive driving by continuously going through a sequence of actions abbreviated as a mnemonic “SIPDE” – Scan, Identify, Predict, Decide and Execute.

Duomo
Duomo

Favourite colours

DSC05279-2_01-30-2017

Our daughter has been attending a new school while we are in Milan. They asked the children to bring their own sets of coloured pencils to be used in art classes.

Here is the state of our daughter’s set after one month of use. I thought that the remaining length of the pencils is a nice visual representations of which colours she favours and by how much.

I wanted to take this picture, because it seems to me straight out of “The Day the Crayons Quit” by Drew Daywalt, and illustrated by the great Oliver Jeffers. Our daughter received this book as a birthday present, but I might have enjoyed it even more than she did.

Not to over-analyze our daughter, but I think the picture shows that she prefer bright colours overall. The exceptions are the white, which is not a very practical colour for drawing on white paper anyway, and the dark yellow, which is a bit redundant, given the that there are two other yellow pencils in this set, both of them well-used. And of course, pink is still the strong favourite.

Incidentally, I once heard in popular science television show in Japan that there was a correlation between the preference for pink colour and health of middle-aged and elderly women. The hypothesis was that liking the pink colour, which is traditionally associated with youth, encourages women to maintain a youthful state of mind, which in turn leads to better health.

Even if there no causation here, I am glad that our daughter sees the world mostly in bright colours. I hope this trend continues as she grows up, and her brightly-coloured pencils and crayons will always be stubby.