Category: Art

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Character development: a make-believe approach

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Playing make-believe is a big part of my four-year-old daughter’s life. Her stories and games about the Baby Chick or the  Baby Dinosaur (anything involving hatching from an egg) become more elaborate as the days go by. The main plots repeats over and over again, but the details are added as she matures. At the same time, a lot remains unsaid and left to the audience’s (most of the time consisting of her mom and dad) imagination. This reminds me of the storytelling style of Oliver Jeffers. In fact, I became a fan of his artwork by reading his (I can only assume, autobiographical) books about the Boy and his penguin friend to my daughter.

I thought that it would be a pity not to capture the development of my daughter’s make-believe games, so I decided to add a bit of focus to my short motorcycle rides by sketching some of the episodes as I drink my cappuccino. So today the story starts, as my bike is parked in view of Mt. Baker, on a fantastic sunny afternoon at the Oak Bay Marina cafe. 

“Once there was a Girl, and on a particularly sunny day, she had a very important job: to take care of a great white Egg. The Egg was smooth and shiny, and the Girl didn’t know what was inside. She could hear tiny tweeting noises coming from the egg, and she hoped that it was a chick, who would become her friend.”

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Publishing your art

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Our new publication, The Black Light Magazine, is accepting first submissions from artists. This made me think about the benefits of sharing art in general, and the parallels between publishing/exhibiting art and public communication.

Making your work public is an integral part of a creative process. The concept is simple and hardly new, but actually making it a reality is not trivial. A work of art is inherently an expression of something that the artist closely associates with, but exhibiting or performing a piece of art is an equivalent of a public statement. In this sense, publishing your work, as any form of public communication is a skill that can be developed and that requires regular practice.

There are many well-known benefits of showing our creations to other people. Artists, who regularly exhibit, share, perform or otherwise publish their work develop a sense of connection with the audience that becomes activated even at the earliest stages of the process. Publishing our work also allows us to develop an ability to receive feedback, both positive and negative, and use it in a constructive way. And of course, if you create and share something new, there is an exciting possibility to build a community around you and your art (not that being in the centre of it actually matters – often, making a contribution to an existing area is most rewarding.)

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Black light

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My photography partners and I are starting a new publication in the area of fluorescent art called “The Black Light Magazine“. This project is exciting, because the area is new, both in general and for me personally. One experiment that I tried recently is digital re-creation of a fluorescent painting effect. 

Fluorescent paint photographed in a UV light produces images with a distinct glow-in-the-dark look, and I tried to analyze what are the features of this effect, so I could replicate them in a digital painting.

The photographed fluorescent paint or makeup has substantially higher brightness levels, compared to the areas of the image that are not painted. Also, the transitions from bright areas to the dark ones are abrupt. In other words, the tonal contrast is high, but only at the edges of the painted patterns. Inside the non-fluorescent, dark regions and within the the bright paint strokes, there is no significant variation of the brightness levels (i.e. the tonal contrast is low).

In terms of colour, popular fluorescent pigments are “neon” variations of yellow, red and green and their derivatives (shades of orange and yellow-green). The fluorescence effect is based on the pigment material absorbing the light energy at a certain wavelength (e.g. In the UV range, which is invisible to human eye) and releasing it at a different (visible) wavelength. The fluorescent light has a narrow band of frequencies, meaning that there is almost no variation in the color within an individual brush stroke.

Ability to digitally reproduce the glow-in-the-dark effect would be useful from creative perspective, because there are certain types of photographs, where UV lighting (or fluorescent painting, for that matter) would not be practical to implement. For my experiment, I used one of my favorite rugby shots as a reference and sketched over it, sampling the colors from a studio photo of a model in fluorescent makeup shot under UV light. I did the sketch in the ProCreate app on an iPad. For more refined painting in the future, I plan to work on  tweaking the brush dynamics (which is better accomplished in Photoshop) to make the individual strokes more “alive”, i.e. varying in thickness and possibly transparency (although current fluorescent paint do not show a lot of transparency variation) along their length.

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On presentation

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Presentation standards change. I have been doing research presentations for many years, but every now and then I find it useful to go back to basics in terms of learning the craft. Otherwise, there is a danger of falling behind times, coming off as archaic and not meeting the expectations of the audience.

Recently, I had a chance to revise my approach when giving a seminar talk at Politecnico di Milano on the use of flow visualization techniques in fluid mechanics. This is my core area of research, so presenting on this topic is almost automatic. That is why I wanted to change things up a bit.

Well, I didn’t do anything revolutionary, but I did actually went online to browse through recent guidelines on presentation. The main change that I implemented as a result was to abandon pointing out every element of each slide, as I described them with a laser pointer – a habit drilled into me and my lab partners by our academic advisor, who was widely considered a near-god-level standard of everything, including presentation skills, in our research area. Instead, I completely eliminated text from the slides, and let them change in the background, in the style of Ted talks.

Incidentally, this trip to Milan provided another illustration of the dynamic nature of presentation in the form of design of store windows and product packaging, for which the city is famous. I had been in Milan only about six months earlier, and during this time, there have been many changes. I had a refreshing feeling that applied art is truly alive, and people genuinely take interest in it, not only for the sake of consumerism, which the art undoubtedly serves, but also for the sake of pure aesthetics.

Perhaps, photographers and artists would do well by making a deliberate point in changing around the style of how they present their art – from a re-designing the look of their websites to actually pushing the boundaries of their creative process and exploring new subjects or techniques.

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Why art needs to be applied

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Derek Sivers, who famously donated most of the proceeds from selling his first company, pointed out in an interview with Cal Newport that people should pursue a radical shift in career only if there is a concrete evidence that others would be willing to pay for the product of the intended work. He said that “Money is a neutral indicator of value. By aiming to make money, you’re aiming to be valuable.”

Personally, for a long time, I have always been attracted to applied art – commercial photography, industrial design, architecture, etc. Even the art that doesn’t seem to be very applied on the surface, such as classical paintings and sculptures of the Renaissance masters, for example, upon closer consideration appears to be quite closely link to applications. Majority of the works of Rafael and Michelangelo were explicitly commissioned to promote the idea of Christianity and the might of the Church.

Of course, assigning a dollar figure to a piece of art is a tricky business, which is influenced by many, often irrational factors, such as fashion or political conjecture. Still, I believe there is at least a grain of rationalism in the idea that what is useful is necessarily valuable. For photographers, for example, capturing human emotions and commemorating life’s milestones is an obvious way to be useful to other people. This why, among the variety of possible niche genres, portrait and wedding photography is considered as the most straightforward way to start making money.

At the same time, I believe that in science, the idea of necessarily linking the scientific pursuit to a well-defined practical application has become overused. Often, the most significant scientific progress starts with pursuing something for pure fun or out of curiosity, without worrying whether the result could be immediately applied or even is something like this has already been done. Richard Feyman, for instance, decided to look into the dynamics of a spinning and vibrating dinner plate, as away of recapturing the excitement of his childhood scientific pursuits. Eventually, this work developed into something, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize, but the connection was not obvious to him at the time.

Artists, for some reason, are expected to do things for the sake of creating itself, and the opportunity to differentiate oneself from the mainstream is to do think differently (i.e. start with the practical application standpoint). In scientific research, the current paradigm seems to be the opposite, so the logical way to go is not to follow the majority, but to do fundamental work (“deep work” in Cal Neport’s terminology) and let the applicability emerge naturally.

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Work in progress

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Richard Feynman explained that for some types of work, e.g. doing theoretical physics derivations, he needed large chunks of uninterrupted time. I personally think that any research work ultimately benefits from this kind of distraction-free workflow.

The reality for myself and, I venture a guess, for most of my colleagues (ok, for most people),  is far from ideal, though. I do my academic writing in what Robert Boice calls brief, regular sessions (BRSs), and strive to keep them as regular as possible, without being concerned that they are more beef than I would like.

Likewise, I draw and paint on my iPad is sessions so short, that they cannot really be called sessions. Still, this ability to steal a minute or two here and there to do a sketch based on a photo that I took in Venice six years ago is precious to me. Sketching on a tablet is not perfect. It would have been nice to fire up Photoshop and draw with a Wacom graphics tablet, but the reality is that other obligations (many of them self-imposed or even imaginary, but this is beside the point) are so numerous, that long, concentrated painting sessions simply don’t happen, or at least don’t happen often enough

Working in microscopic, fragmented slices of time is a compromise, but it is better than not working at all. In fact, this fragmented workflow even has it’s unique advantages, but the main benefit is that it enables consistency, which is crucial for skill development, or improvement in general.

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Jedi mind tricks

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Daniel Gilbert in his popular psychology book “Stumbling on Happiness” describes a study that demonstrated the fact that people like and strive on being in control (or rather, on perception of being in control) of the consequences of their actions. He gives examples of toddlers, who are delighted that they can topple a pyramid of blocks, to retirement home residents, who live longer because they are given a responsibility to care for a house plant.

This trait can be exploited to play “Jedi mind tricks” on ourselves, when we are working to master a skill or form a habit. Habits are notoriously difficult to form (the flip side of it is that they are also hard to break.) Particularly difficult is the initial stage of the habit-forming process, where it is psychologically easier not to perform the new behavior. Eventually, after about three weeks of daylight practice, the trend reverses, but the first days is where the resistance (read: “procrastination”), which Steven Pressfield describes in detail in his “The War of Art,” can overcome us with ease.

They way to work through this is to set up the practice in the early days I a way that makes it nearly impossible to fail, to stack the deck in our favor. Archers do this by shooting arrows at the target while standing at an arm’s length from it. Weight lifters do this by lifting a bar without plates. This practice establishes an early victory, an equivalent of scoring a goal in the first minute of a soccer match. This immediately boosts confidence and establishes a perception of control of the outcome of our actions, which is crucial for maintaining the motivation to continue with the practice.

The initial stage of (super-easy) practice might not do much for the skill development per se, but it serves as a Trojan horse for sneaking in the habit of practicing into our daily routine.

Applying this to photography, if we want to develop a habit of taking photos every day, for example, it would make sense to simplify the logistics of it as much as possible, at least when we are just getting started. This means taking the photos early in the day, before other obligations take over, avoiding complicated lighting setups (shooting with ambient light) and using a phone camera instead of a DSLR camera. Choosing subjects that would not require us to go out of our way (literally and figuratively) is also helpful. For example, I have been taking landscape snapshots using my iPhone from my daughter’s school yard when we drop her off there every morning.

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Discipline = freedom

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I am continually amazed how well the concepts from martial arts, including tactics, training and teaching methods, etc., apply to other areas of life. Perhaps, with military training, the stakes are so high that the techniques evolved to crystallize the most fundamental and universally-applicable principles.

One of these principles is summarized in a maxim “Discipline equals freedom.” This might seem counter-intuitive at the first glance, but I find it is perfectly applicable to photography, where discipline comes up at several levels, from continuing practice and developing the shooting and post-processing skills to carefully and methodically packing the gear when going to a shoot to systematically experimenting with various camera and lighting settings during the shoot itself. The freedom then literally means creative freedom. When all the logistics and methodology is taken care of in a very disciplined inner, our full mental capacity, the entire bandwidth, is available for processing the incoming information, which allows us to react to changing conditions and opportunities during the shoot and to recognize potentially interesting patterns and combinations of lighting, composition, posing (in the case of portraits) and even future ways of using or displaying the images.

in other words, discipline allows us to reserve creativity for things that truly require it.

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Painting

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Painting can be a very effective excersize for facilitating creative decision-making. Robert Rodriguez, a movie director and an accomplished artist, mentioned in a recent interview that he used to make actors paint on the movie set between their filming sessions. The idea is that making creative decisions related to colour choice, composition, etc. are fundamentally more challenging than trivial details that people are often obsessed about in their everyday situations (e.g. props or makeup/wardrobe/lighting issues on a movie set, for which there are often very efficient workarounds that are not even worth fussing about.)

Followed this example, I decided to paint for an hour or so alongside my four-year-old daughter, using a photo of flowers in the courtyard of the Sforza Castle in Milan that I took earlier this year. It was certainly fun to paint together with my daughter, and I am amazed at how quickly she is growing up and delighted to be able to share this time with her. In this sense at least, painting definitely puts things in the right perspective for me.

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On creativity

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Recently, I listened to a very inspiring interview with a film director (as well as a writer, producer, editor, composer, etc.) Robert Rodriguez, who shared some neat ideas about creativity, which, according to him, can be found in every human activity. More precisely, we can bring creativity into everything that we do.

This is a neat way of looking at the dilemma of striving to be a polymath versus being a narrow specialist. Rodriguez says that when people ask him why he does so many different things, he replies that he does only one thing – leaving a creative life.

In practical terms, he suggests doing things in short bursts, over periods of half-an-hour of so at a time. In my experience, this approach generally works, although there are some activities (e.g. academic research) that requires larger chunks of uninterrupted time. In fact, working in brief, regular sessions, so called BRSs, can be shown to be the best approach to academic work too. As Rodrigues puts it, you just need to chip away at various personal projects, whether it is learning to play a guitar or painting between filming scenes of a movie, on the daily basis, and by the end of the week, if look back, you’ll see that you are leaving your dream.

A key moment here is not to be afraid to try new things. This requires one to believe in oneself, in the sense that mastery of almost any kind of skill or activity at a very high (indeed, world-class) level is possible, given sufficient time and effort. Rodrigues gives an example (which might not be true, BTW – I don’t think there was a formal study on this) that when very young children are asked, who among them thinks that he/she could be an astronaut, a composer, etc., there is a forest of raised hands, probably due to the lack of life experience on part of the kids. When the same question is asked of the same kids a couple of years later, much fewer hands are raised – there is no significant increase in expense, but somehow the children lose their belief in themselves. As adults, we have an advantage of being aware of what is happening with us, so we should consciously keep raising our hand.

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