Category: Art

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“Hokusai says”: philosophy of the artist

I came across a poem by Roger S. Keys called “Hokusai says” a couple of weeks ago. Among other things, it’s an illustration of the principle that I keep telling my students, who work on their papers and theses – even though, objectively, most of the writing out there is actually re-writing of someone else’s thoughts or findings, there is value in re-wording and summarizing those thoughts again. The very act of re-processing and condensing the “old” information adds something new to it and makes it more accessible to others.

The poem is about Katsushika Hokusai – a monumental figure in the history of art. To me personally, it is fascinating how he was both influenced by and had a strong influence on the Western art. Somehow, he seems similar to Leonardo da Vinci in his incredible skills of observation and distilling the essence of phenomena simply by looking and thinking.

Hokusai’s writing is less known than his art, but he left some incredible bits of wisdom over the course of his long life. And this is what Roger Keys talking about in his poem. It’s a fantastic portrait of Hokusai, the philosopher. Curiously, I couldn’t find much info about Roger Keys himself after some casual poking around online, besides the fact that he is a scholar of Japanese art and has some association with Brown University.

Here is the poem. Enjoy.

Hokusai says

Hokusai says look carefully.
He says pay attention, notice.
He says keep looking, stay curious.
He says there is no end to seeing.

He says look forward to getting old.
He says keep changing,
you just get more who you really are.
He says get stuck, accept it, repeat
yourself as long as it is interesting.

He says keep doing what you love.

He says keep praying.

He says every one of us is a child,
every one of us is ancient
every one of us has a body.
He says every one of us is frightened.
He says every one of us has to find
a way to live with fear.

He says everything is alive —
shells, buildings, people, fish,
mountains, trees, wood is alive.
Water is alive.

Everything has its own life.

Everything lives inside us.

He says live with the world inside you.

He says it doesn’t matter if you draw,
or write books. It doesn’t matter
if you saw wood, or catch fish.
It doesn’t matter if you sit at home
and stare at the ants on your veranda
or the shadows of the trees
and grasses in your garden.
It matters that you care.

It matters that you feel.

It matters that you notice.

It matters that life lives through you.
Contentment is life living through you.
Joy is life living through you.
Satisfaction and strength
is life living through you.
He says don’t be afraid.
Don’t be afraid.
Love, feel, let life take you by the hand.
Let life live through you.

— Roger S. Keyes

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Flashback to Milano

While flipping through my sketchbook yesterday, I came across this picture, which I sketched exactly four years ago to the day. My wife and I were on sabbatical in Milan, and our daughter and I were drawing plants on a sunny day in the Brera Botanical Garden – a quiet green nook in the middle of the city. There, we met a local artist, who came over and mentioned that he used to have the same kind of sketchbook. We chatted and looked through each other’s sketches – mine on paper and his on his phone. It was one of those fascinating “one chance – one meeting” moments, which I often go back to in my memory. Actually, it turned out to be not just one meeting, because we later had a chance to visit the artist’s home studio, being somewhat overwhelmed by his and his wife’s hospitality.

I took thousands of photographs and video clips during our six-months stay in Italy, but the sketches, which I got into a habit of doing fairly regularly, definitely carry more emotional content for me personally. On reflection, this makes me want to pick up the sketching habit again.

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Traditional house-elf roles

A gadget I’ve been enjoying over the past week is a robotic vacuum Roomba. In fact our entire family has been having fun with it. My daughter aptly named it Dobby, after the house-elf from “Harry Potter”. I find it particularly ironic in the context of the recent International Women’s Day. I was looking online at some old Soviet postcards celebrating the 8th of March and came across this one (see below). A rough translation of the verse is that giving this kind of robot as a present for your spouse (it says “wife” specifically – in case there were any doubts that this is from pre-PC days) would stop nagging in the household, making life easier for everyone.

In the “Harry Potter”, incidentally, Hermione Granger advocated for liberation of house-elves from oppression by the wizarding society by founding S.P.E.W. – Society for the Promotion of Elfish Wellfare. She originally wanted to call the organization “Stop the Outrageous Abuse of Our Fellow Magical Creatures and Campaign for a Change in Their Legal Status,” but the name would not fit on a badge.

So happy house-robot day, everybody! Oh, and don’t forget to join S.P.E.W.!

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Sculpting by numbers

I’ve always enjoyed building scale models, and lately this interest has been rekindled after my daughter and I started working on a Gunpla (Japanese abbreviation for Gundam plastic model). The specific model we chose proved to be too advanced for a nine-year-old, both in terms of her ability to focus on the intricate instructions and the sheer complexity of the construction itself. It’s been just perfect for me, though – challenging enough to be entertaining, and providing an attractive result at each stage of the build, which maintained my daughter’s interest in the project.

As I’ve been building this model, I’ve been thinking why it feels so satisfying to do it. There is no creative aspect in it, at least not until (and if) one decides to paint and customize the model. In that case, there are limitless opportunities for creativity, as evidenced by many YouTube videos that show insane levels of detail and realism that some modellers can achieve. The model can be “weathered”, for example, to simulate realistic wear, tear and battle damage.

Building a Gunpla is similar to painting-by-numbers colouring books that are popular with kids (and some adults, I am sure). Only in the case of plastic models, you are sculpting by numbers. the process goes like this: consult the schematics in the instructional booklet, find the numbered part, cut it from the “sprue tree” (the plastic frame that connects the moulded parts), file away the excess plastic, polish the surface, snap the parts together, et voilà! – a miniature sculpture emerges. You’ve got almost all the benefits of creative surprise without the hard work of problem-solving.

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Photo vs. video

As I’ve been working on my video-making skills during the COVID-forced remote teaching terms, I’ve noticed that photo- and videography offer very different experiences both from the creator’s and the viewer’s standpoint. I tried to analyze why this is the case, and came to the following hypothesis. 

A still image creates a synthetic experience for the viewer. All the information in the picture is presented at once, so the viewer can make up their own version of the story. This doesn’t mean that it’s a synthetic experience for the creator, though. Actually, it takes a series of distinct, sequential steps to create a still image. For example, in the photography context, it could mean setting up the lighting, taking the photo and post-processing it. The sequential nature of still image-creation is even more apparent in classical painting, which involves sketching, mixing colours and painting multiple layers to render the form to various degrees of detail in the different parts of the image. The the finished painting is presented to the viewer, they see it all at once: the entirety of the shapes, colours and all the paint layers. It is then the job for the viewer’s brain to synthesize this information and formulate a story.

A movie, on the other hand, is an actual story. The viewer cannot ingest it all at once. The information has to be consumed as a sequence that was deliberately laid out by the author. Ironically, the process of creating a video is, in a sense, synthetic in that the author needs to have the entire process in their head, from how the footage needs to be shot to how it is going to be edited. Of course, post-processing is a big part of still photography too, but when I shoot photos, I am generally not making specific plans of how I am going to process them. With video, though, I am constantly re-evaluating how the footage I am capturing would be spliced together in the final product.

I think this difference in how the still and moving images are created and consumed is the reason that the emergence of mainstream video production did not result in extinction of still photography. The two genres are simply too different.

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On the value sketching

I realized a while ago that sketching is a good exercise for developing observation skills and, more generally, memory. It requires full concentration, because the subject is usually not standing still, and one needs to be able to consciously think about which features of the subject are essential and which are superficial. The deliberate thinking is important, because it is the mechanism that allows committing the visual information to long(er)-term memory. The short-term memory (the one in which information lives for a couple of seconds) is not sufficient for preserving the visual details until they can be captured on paper.

Lately, I’ve been recording video highlights to supplement lectures in my Advanced Fluid Mechanics course, and one of those is about the importance of being able to make conceptual sketches of flow features for understanding of the underlying physics. Incidentally, one of the forefathers of studies of fluid mechanics was Leonardo da Vinci, whose approach was based on (some would say it entirely consisted of) observation and sketching of the natural phenomena. We are not aiming at Leonardo’s level of artistry in my fluids course, but observation is an important skill for a scientist and an engineer, and sketching is way to develop it.

The book I am recommending in the video is “Boundary-Layer Theory” by Herrmann Schichting. It is one of the first technical books I bought as a grad student, because I knew that it would remain a classic.

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Eating an elephant

“Leave a light on”. Detail. Work in progress.

My current painting project is an eight-figure composition. It’s a relatively big deal for me in terms of investment of time and focus. This is partly because I am using a variation of a conventional technique, aiming at a realistic (although not a photo-realistic) result. It involves building the forms in multiple layers, often allowing them to dry between applications.

I keep reminding myself that the way to eat a proverbial elephant is one bite at a time. So I work on this painting in small chunks of time, tackling a small area of the canvas in each session. Currently, I am at a stage when I’ve eaten quite a few bites and starting to feel a bit full, but at the same time realize that what remains is still very much an elephant.

It’s curious how my head works, though. Every now and then, I want to set this picture aside (because of the lack of novelty, no doubt) and start another big painting project. That is like being quite full with the elephant you’ve been eating but dealing with it by ordering another elephant from the menu.

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Ways to fail

Beginning of the under-painting.

When I was starting my academic job as a new faculty member, I read a book by Robert Boice appropriately called “Advice for New Faculty Members.” He conducted a quantitative study of the work habits of new professors, who ultimately succeeded in their careers, and of those, who failed. The work of professors can be broadly classified into teaching and research (what Boice referred to as writing, because academic writing, more specifically its impact, is an indicator of research success.)

It turns out that in teaching, the most common way to fail is do more preparation when encountering teaching challenges (and everyone comes across those at some point.) This is counter-intuitive, but it turns out that teaching prep is a black hole of time that would definitely drain you of any creative energy you might have had at the binning, unless you deliberately and decisively put a limit to how much time you spend on it. On the positive side, and also quite unexpectedly, the data shows that teaching works out just fine for those, who don’t do too much prep. There are good explanations for this fact. In a nutshell, by not being a perfectionist, you can can free up some mental energy to think about the larger context of your life, of which teaching is a part. Having this perspective keeps you from burning out and loathing the prep process and the teaching itself. Ultimately, it makes you are more interesting person and, as a consequence, a better teacher.

In writing, it turns out, there are multiple ways fo fail. Academic writing involves several key components: an the over-arching idea, or hypothesis, for whatever article you are working on, a systematic approach for supporting the idea (testing the hypothesis) and the coherent expression of the results in the context of the existing state-of-the-art. Each of this components presents an opportunity to fail or succeed. So avoiding failure is quite tricky, and, for me personally, this is what makes writing interesting.

I find that the creative process of writing is similar to the classical approach to oil painting in many ways, including the ways you can fail in both endeavours. Assuming that you have a general idea of what you’d like to paint, the first step is to create a rough under painting. It is like a first draft of a written article. In order to have a shot at success, it is important to separate the writing from editing. Likewise, the key thing with under-painting is to quickly move towards sketching out the basic shapes, without being distracted by getting the small details and colours right.

After the underpainting is done, the rest of the process is, essentially, editing. My painting teacher says that what you do is make small corrections (“just by a tiny amount”) to a section of the painting, applying them layer-by-layer. Once the details of each of the small areas of the painting are finished (see below on what is meant here by “finished”), it is time to work on the overall picture, checking that the colours and the tonal values of the different parts do not conflict with each other. Again, this is done by making small corrections in each subsequent layer of paint.

This editing continues until the painting is finished. The criterion for what constitutes a “finished” work is reaching the stage at which you are no longer sure whether applying additional changes makes it better or worse. So there is a real possibility of making things worse than they were by not stopping at the right moment. Incidentally, this is the main argument for taking frequent breaks from your work, even at the risk of interrupting a flow state. Doing so allows you to take a more detached, if not completely objective, look at the current state of your work and thus avoid making costly mistakes. My sculpture teacher emphasized this, and that is what Boice described as “finishing early,” i.e. before you feel ready – another common technique of successful academics.

The head on the left is almst fiished.

Pieces of art that are utter failures fail in every single aspect – the details are wrong and they don’t fit together into the larger composition. Paintings of beginner students are often like this. But even more advanced artists often fail in one or more aspects. Sometimes the perspective is a bit off, the colours clash, or the tonal relations are wrong, even though the rest of the elements are fine. Even Leonardo’s paintings are not free of errors (which shows that he was human after all).

Arguably, each colour selection and ultimately each brushstroke represents a creative decision that carries a possibility of success or failure. I believe that decisions involved in painting a picture are fundamentally more difficult than those that many of us, or at least me personally, face in what we call our “professional” work. And, assuming that we are painting as a hobby, our identities are not tied up into the result as tightly as they are in the “real work”, so the perceived stakes are not as high. I think that is what makes painting so enjoyable – it provides an opportunity to learn about various failure modes and to do so safely.

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Bending the rules

“Finite players play within boundaries; infinite players play with boundaries.”
James P. Carse “Finite and Infinite games”

Last week, I missed a deadline for a research funding proposal by several days. Originally, I was not planning to apply at all, but as I worked on a larger research plan, it became apparent that it would be great to add an ultra-high-speed camera to our arsenal. It also became apparent that I wouldn’t get the needed info from the supplier in time to meet the deadline. Being a good academic citizen, I asked the administration for an extension. No answer. Being in addition an optimist, I interpreted the lack of response as a go-ahead. After all, nobody said “no”. Long story short: I wrote the proposal, and it was accepted despite being late. That’s not a guarantee that we’ll get the funds, by the way, but did I mention that optimism is important?

I think that mild disregard for the rules is required for progress, generally speaking. It is very much in the spirit of Steve Jobs’ “reality distortion field”, brilliantly documented by Walter Isaacson. When told by his team that a certain goal was not possible due to various objective reasons, Jobs would still insist on pressing forward, ultimately proving everyone wrong (not always, but often). It is liberating to remind yourself that you are always free to make the rules of the game you are currently playing a mere component of a larger, encompassing game. As James Carse writes, “There are no rules that require us to obey rules.”

It is also easy to assume that the rules are there even when they are not. I am taking a painting class, where we copy a Rembrandt’s self-portrait. The other day, I was transferring a pencil sketch onto a canvas. To check the proportions, I projected the original painting on top of my sketch using a digital projector. In the end, I was quite pleased with the result and showed it to my mother (“Look mom, no hands!” kind of feeling). “Are you allowed to use that?” she asked pointing at the projector. I thought that it was ironic that we assume, by default, that using modern technology constitutes cheating when our goal is to study the work of old masters. I remember reading (also in a biography by Isaacson) that Leonardo da Vinci and his contemporaries went to great lengths to invent and build contraptions for projecting original images on their canvasses for copying. Some even went as far as making sketches of Florentine cityscapes on pieces of semi-transparent fabric stretched across a window. I am convinced that if Leonardo, Rembrandt or Van Gogh had access to an optical projector they would definitely use it.

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On training and education

“To be prepared against surprise is to be trained. To be prepared for surprise is to be educated.”
James P. Carse “Finite and Infinite Games.”

One of the most rewarding aspects of art, painting in particular, for me is that the outcome is always somewhat different from the mental image of the finished product that I start out with. It is fascinating to see that the little details that initially seem out of place and that I try to fix in order to make them fit my original idea gradually begin to work with each other and eventually form a harmonious image, albeit different from what I imagined at first. This gradually revealed surprise is what makes it worthwhile to spend hours on a painting.

I recently took a figure painting course, and worked on a painting for about fifteen hours on and off, yet it’s far from being finished. Watching it take shape and being constantly surprised is what makes me going. In contrast, I routinely take hundreds of photographs during a single sports match or a dance class. What makes me engaged in that case is trying to become better at taking photos, so that my result is more predictable – I anticipate interesting action moments, compose and expose the shots better, develop a more efficient workflow. In other words, in photography I am mainly working on avoiding surprises, while in art I am working to cultivate them.

Of course, this is only true generally-speaking. In fact, I also work on developing my painting technique and really enjoy the unexpected shots that I capture with my camera every now and then. Still, this difference in how we treat unexpected events in our lives is remarkable. I started noticing it after I’ve picked up James Carse’s book “Finite and Infinite Games” couple of weeks ago. It’s one of the most deeply insightful books I’ve read in a while. Perhaps, it’s at the level similar to Robert Pirsig’s “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” which is a very high bar as far as I am concerned.