Category: Art

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Learning from the master

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This is a tree that I see from my office window. I snapped a picture of it with my phone and did the drawing afterwards on an iPad.

I have been learning to draw from my six-year-old daughter. Not the technique per se, but to enjoy the drawing process itself. Children are masters of having fun, and my daughter’s drawing is a perfect example. She enjoys it so much that she goes right to her desk when she comes home, without even changing out of her school clothes. It doesn’t bother her at all that she might not have time to finish the picture, that she might get interrupted halfway through her project by us calling her to have dinner. In fact, she probably doesn’t view drawing in terms of projects at all. It is simply something to enjoy at the moment.

I find that emulating this attitude is not as easy at it sounds. The barriers that keep me from doing it are entirely imaginary. For example, when I was on sabbatical, I found time to sketch almost on a daily basis. I enjoyed it a lot and thought that it was a great exercise for developing observation skills. Now, when I am firmly back to my daily routine, I objectively don’t have any less time for sketching. In fact, I have even more opportunities – all my art supplies are right here in my house. Yet, somehow I hesitate to start something that I might not be able to finish, even though there is no external pressure to complete “the project” whatsoever.

So I am learning this child-like attitude from my daughter – taking action for the fun of it and not worrying about the result.

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Cookie-cutter projects

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Over the long weekend, my daughter and I finally finished the soapstone carving project that we started almost a year ago. We bought a kit that contained a block of stone cut out in a rough shape of an orca. It looked exactly as if it was done with a cookie-cutter. In fact, it was made by hand using a scroll saw. We talked to the sculptor, who made these kits. He said that it took he quite a bit of trial and error to find the right dimensions of the cutout. But once it was done, it was matter of rounding the edges and smoothing the surface to produce a rather neat carved figure of an orca. The success was practically guaranteed, and a 6-7 year-old kid could produce a carving in a matter of hours.

In our defence, the reason it took us so long was that we had to leave the figure unfinished while we went to Europe for most of the year. All that was left to be done was to wax and buff the surface. We used a hair dryer to heat the stone orca (it became so hot that I had to hold it with a towel!) and rubbed it with a piece of wax, which was also in the kit. When the stone cooled down, we buffed the surface with a piece of cloth.

I wonder if it is the key to a successful and enjoyable creative project for beginners in any field: having the most time-consuming part pre-completed (e.g. providing a pre-cut rough shape of a statue with correct proportions), while leaving some room for creativity in terms of small details and finishing touches.

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This principle worked in a similar way, when my wife and daughter baked chocolate muffins to celebrate our daughter’s birthday at school. Both enjoyed the baking, largely because they used a store-bought mix for the dough.

Probably, this idea of having the hard work done is behind the enduring popularity of colouring books. After all, the outline is already there, with the proportions and the composition taken care of. All that is left is to have fun colouring the details.

University students sometimes complain that the projects they are doing in the labs are “cookie-cutter experiments”, meaning that the outcomes are predetermined, and there is no element of scientific discovery in their work. Perhaps, the instructors, who design the projects, need to find a balance between guiding the students by having some of the preliminary work done beforehand, but allowing enough uncertainty in the remaining process to enable sometimes-surprising results.

Then again, at some point someone would have to learn how to do the entire project from scratch, starting from the metaphorical rough piece of stone and finishing with a polished sculpture. There is a great pleasure in creating your own paintings instead of colouring within the lines all the time.

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Attention to detail

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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.

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What can you draw in 5 minutes?

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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.

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Creative patterns

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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.

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Splatters!
Splatters!
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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Modern art

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Hedonic adaptation to sabbatical

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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.

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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.

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Using colours

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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.

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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!

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