Author: admin

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Justifying fun

In his auto-biographical “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!”, Richard Feynman criticized physics textbooks of his day by saying that most examples in them were written by people, who never tried to replicate the problems as experiments (for example, to illustrate friction, one could have timed how long it would take a rolling ball to stop on different surfaces). When I first read it, I thought how much fun it would be to do things not for their potential value or impact, but simply for “the pleasure of finding things out”, as Feynman put it. But at the same time, I thought that it would be prohibitively impractical: who would be interested in a simple friction experiment that must have been done countless times before?

It is justification of trying and doing fun things that what I, and probably most other people, struggle with. Perhaps, one way to think about it is to somehow link the individual fun experiments into larger-scale projects. Perhaps, thinking about them as contributing to a “body of work“, e.g., learning a skill, developing a relationship with a child, etc.

Speaking about doing fun things with children, last week, I learned that a cheetah, my daughter’s favourite animal, can cover 7 m in a single stride. This came from the illustrated book called “Animal!” that she spent a lot of time with over the Spring break. As a side note, the photographs in that book and nothing short of amazing – quite inspiring. In the spirit of Feynman’s suggestion, we measured 7 m with a measuring tape, and it turned out that a cheat could jump across both our living and dining rooms at once! I must say that it is one thing to read about 7 meters in a book and another to see what it looks like in reality. Power of a physical demonstration in action!

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Keeping up with children

After spending a beautiful afternoon at the Butchart Gardens, my daughter wanted to go for a run/bike ride with me. We first did thins kind of thing last year in Milan. I would go running, and she would bike alongside. We would go from our apartment along Naviglio Martesana to a playground that was about 2.5 km away. That was about how far my daughter could pedal nonstop at that time. Today we did a solid 5k, almost without a word of complaining from her. Our average pace was still nothing to brag about, but I am not taking for granted that we can do this together at all. At some point, it is I who won’t be able to keep up and will be slowing her down. What are the chances that she would want to run with me then?

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Learning experience

Last week, I was eager to try out my new markers, which I got as a birthday present. So I started drawing a portrait of my daughter, based on a photo that I took in Sindney, where she was holding a scooter and squinting into the sun. I did a pencil sketch, and it looked pretty good, so I was quite pleased. When I started shading it with markers, though, the colours on her face came out so dark, that I immediately declared the drawing ruined, and tore it apart in a classical Georgia O’Keeffe fashion. Even though I know that it is important not to become attached to the final product and instead to treat each artistic project as a learning experience, it is amazing how easy it is to start expecting pleasant surprises at the end of every drawing session.

Anyway, one lesson learned from this: don’t be in a rush to destroy things because (a) they don’t look that bad the next day when seen with fresh eyes, and (b) many mistakes are actually correctable, even with such media as markers.

  • More seriously, a couple of things to keep in mind when drawing are:
  • Maintain subtlety of the colours and the tones seen in the subject. It is easy to become too excited and over-paint things.
    Throw away the idea of creating a pretty picture. This seem counter-intuitive, but it is actually somewhat similar to sutemi in kendo – abandoning the idea of winning and throwing yourself completely into the attack.

It actually took me some concentrated thinking and watching a few YouTube videos to somewhat come to grips with blending the markers. i also decided to zoom in on the portrait to keep things more manageable for my next attempt. Here is the result.

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Content vs design

The other day, we have been talking to a graphic designer about our magazine, and she mentioned the two basic approaches to putting an issue together – content first and design first. The former is about writing stories, the latter is about art.

I realized that it is a useful framework for other creative projects as well. For example, with blogging, I’ve been thinking that a neat productivity hack would be focus the posts around photographs. Simply letting the images speak for themselves and, at the extreme, allowing the viewers create their own narrative about them if they want. That would be analogous to the ‘design first’ approach.

Yet I personally prefer reading stories illustrated by images to watching slideshows with extended captions. Besides, every image has a story behind it, even if it is not necessarily a profound one. For example, this sketch could stand on its own, just as my doodling impression of a sunny day at the beach. But what makes it meaningful for me is that I made it trying out my birthday present – a set of design pens markers.

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Sidney by the sea

Sidney is one of the special places in that it always feels nice, even after a short visit. Somehow, it has a feeling of getting away, even though it is only a few minutes drive from home. Probably, it’s the combinations of it’s small size and the fact that every time we go there, we have no particular agenda.

It is picturesque, for sure, but even taking photos there feels relaxed and unfocussed (not in the sense of lacking optical sharpness, but without a purpose in mind). I guess, I have this idea on the back of my mind that while this town is very pretty, it is, essentially, or backyard, and so there will alway be another chance to photograph the same view. Still, these views are some of my favourites, and I don’t mind taking the same photos of them time after time.

“Pure energy”. A sculpture by Armando Barbon in Sidney, BC, Canada.

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Frozen

I’ve been walking across campus for several years now, but apparently there are still curious spots along the way that I haven’t noticed before. The reason is that as I walk from point A to point B, I almost alway take the same route. The force of habit acts as an autopilot of sort. A couple of weeks ago, I realized that my familiar route from the office to the gym is not the shortest one. There were some corners to be cut and diagonals to extend. Not that I was wasting a lot of time before, but the new route I found was was, perhaps, a minute or so faster, so as an engineer, I was compelled to increase the efficiency.

As a result, I discovered for myself a neat sculpture of a whale’s tail sticking out of the pond. I thought that it looked slightly comical, being obviously out-of-scale with the tiny body of water the implied animal is supposed to occupy. It reminded me of the monster-infested swamp on a planet in Dagobah star system, where Luke Skywalker crash-landed his x-wing fighter in Empire Strikes Back. Last week, we had a rear cold spell, and the sculpture looked even more fantastic, with the tail sticking out of the ice. A frozen motion indeed!

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The greatest artistry

Leonardo da Vinci monument. Milan. Italy.

I’ve been reading the biography of Leonardo da Vinci by Walter Isaacson, and it’s insightful to learn that even an artist of such enormous stature as Leonardo had his own role models and influences. It is somehow liberating to find out the small, even mundane details about people, who are universally recognized as absolute giants of achievement. The more you know about your idols, the more human they become. In fact, some say you should never meet your idealized role models in person because of the risk of becoming disillusioned with them.

Leonardo, most likely, had never met his role model, Leon Battista Alberti, who was influential among artists and engineers of his time. Curiously, Leonardo strived to develop his uniques style, without much regard to the option of others, but in everyday, mundane matters, he aimed to exercise artistic approach, following Alberti’s maxim: “One must apply the greatest artistry in three things: walking in the city, riding a horse, and speaking, for in each of these one must try to please everyone.” Leonardo, apparently, became a model for his contemporaries in all three.

Panoramic vie of Florence from Pizzale Michelangelo. Italy.
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To undo or not to undo

My daughter’s art teacher said that one of the problems she sees with the kids using digital media (tablets, computers) for drawing is the use of the Undo function. When they click Undo, the last brushstroke disappears not only from the screen, but somehow from their memory as well, as if whatever had been drawn before never existed. She suggested using the Eraser tool instead, because when you take time to move your hand over the drawing to erase the lines, you are still committing them to memory. That way, you have a chance to learn from your mistakes as you correct them.

Personally, I noticed another potential problem with the Undo function (and with digital art in general, for that matter) a while ago – it is the possibility of endless corrections. I know that with a digital file, there is always an opportunity to revisit a drawing, so I tend to linger over it while it would be more productive to declare it completed and to move on to a new one.

This is why I like sketching on physical paper every now and then, even though I am really enjoying ProCreate on my iPad these days. For my last couple of sketches, I decided to take the practice to the next level by using non-erasable brush-pens only. So effectively, no corrections are allowed – what you get the first time around is what you see.

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Snow day

Last year, we missed the uncharacteristic snowfalls in Victoria, because we were in Milan on sabbatical, but today we had a rare glimpse of beautiful winter weather. The kids in my daughter’s class even got a break from homework to enjoy the snow.

We built a snowman. And if you think that our sculpting skills are wanting, our neighbour’s dog didn’t think so – he was baking at it for quite a while, trying to scare it off our lawn. I consider it indisputable acknowledgement of likeness by an impartial judge.

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Crossing cultures

“Named must your fear be before banish it you can.”
— Yoda, from Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back

Yesterday, I noticed I’ve had this quote by Jigoro Kano, the founder of judo, hanging in an open Safari tab on my phone for the past year or so:

Face your fear, empty yourself, trust your own voice, let go of control, have faith in outcomes, connect with a larger purpose, derive meaning from the struggle.

I like it probably because it is so ambiguous that it seems all-encompassing and applicable to every aspect of life. As with many Japanese quotes, particularly in English translation, who knows what each part of Kano sensei’s writing really means?

It is curious how closely it resembles some of the western philosophy. The first part, about facing fears, for example, is similar to the stoic ideas of fear setting that Seneca wrote about:

Set aside a certain number of days, during which you shall content with the scantiest and cheapest fare, with coarse and rough dress, saying to yourself the while: “Is this the condition that I feared?”

Seneca was a contemporary of Jesus, but his work was largely unaffected by Christianity. Kano’s martial arts teachings are, essentially, modern, and they are also outside of Christian influence for obvious reasons. So absence of Christian influence is one commonality, but otherwise, the historical and cultural settings where these ideas came from could not be more different. Extrapolating my own experience as a foreigner practicing a Japanese martial art, Japanese culture and its Buddhism-based philosophy is initially attractive to westerners precisely because it is foreign and novel. But as one looks deeper, the same cultural gap makes it unapproachable at a more advanced level. So every now and then stumbling upon western counterparts to the foundational ideas of the East is useful and somehow comforting.