Category: Italy

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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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Urban transportation

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It has been two months since I have driven a car. This is probably my longest non-driving stretch in the last twenty years.

Our priority for choosing an apartment in Milan during the sabbatical was proximity to our daughter’s school. We wanted to be within walking distance from it, because that is where we would need to go twice every day – to drop her off in the morning and to pick her up in the afternoon. By all accounts, driving in Milan is not fun. It is not so much the driving itself that is stressful – it is not being able to avoid fines for obscure violations like illegal parking or inadvertently crossing a bus lane.

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The first apartment we chose was literally within steps of the school, but we had to move to another accommodation because of a formality related to our registration with Italian authorities – the apartment was slightly too small to legally accommodate our family. The new apartment is much nicer: it is more spacious and bright. The location is also better in all but one aspect – it is twice as far as the first place from our daughter’s school.

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Now, instead of walking, our daughter commutes to school on a bicycle, while my wife and I walk. The bicycle belongs to the son of my colleague. The boy has outgrown it, so he lent the bike to us for the time of our stay in Milan. It became our daughter’s daily transport. It takes about three adult-sized steps to cover the same distance that she travels in one revolution of her bike pedals. I would say, it is fair – at least, we can travel wherever we want at a reasonable pace (sometimes, a bit too briskly for true comfort). In fact, Google predicts that it should take eighteen minutes to walk from our apartment to the school, but we regularly make it there in ten.

Night ride
Night ride

Besides the daily commute to and from school, our favourite route for biking, walking and jogging is a footpath that starts near our apartment and follows a canal (Naviglio Martesana), crossing railroad tracks and busy streets in graffiti-covered underpasses. The canal, the path, and the many parks along it are a welcome retreat from the hectic city life surrounding them. Along the canal, there are several picturesque houses that I keep snapping pictures of, to use as references for future sketches.

Canal house
Canal house
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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.

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Duomo
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MUBA – experiencing the world first-hand

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We thought that Milan children’s museum (Museo dei bambini – MUBA) would be a good place to visit as a change of pace from more conventional museums we’ve been to in the past couple of weeks.

The MUBA is a neat place. The building itself stands in the middle of a garden, enclosed by a hexagonal baroque colonnade, Rotonda della Besana, which used to be a cemetery. It has multiple gates, but only one of them was open, so the inner courtyard was like a quiet oasis in the middle of a busy neighbourhood. Groups of teenagers were sitting on the steps of the colonnade, listening to music, hanging around, chatting, doing nothing. There was also a playground for small kids, but no-one was there, so our daughter had it all for herself, until she became cold, and we moved on.

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I realized that we’ve been pre-conditioned by our North American lifestyle to view teenagers hanging around as kind of delinquents by default – “Don’t they have anything better to do?” If there would be a bunch of 5-year-olds running around the playground, this would be another story – they would be playing, and playing is what 5-year-olds do. It is their job. They learn about the world through play.

I think this is not fair to the teens, though. Actually, hanging around in groups is what teenagers are supposed to do too. This is social networking in the best sense of the word. Teen years is when people learn to interact within the social groups, so hanging around together is, in fact, the best thing those guys and girls could do with their time. They were also learning about the world.

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The MUBA concept itself reminded me of Montessori system of education – the kids get to touch, scratch, push, kick everything, and through all this get some sort of educational input. The show, if it is the right term, that we went to was called “Forbidden not to touch”. It was design to showcase the ideas of tactile and kinesthetic learning developed by Bruno Minari, an artist and inventor, who was a native of Milan.

The museum website implied that it would be well suited to English speakers, but it turned out to be almost entirely in Italian. That was not a problem, though. The nature of the activities the kids were doing and the body language of the group leader were so self-explanatory that our daughter had no trouble following along with the group. That in itself was an impressive illustration of Munari’s concept with its departure from the conventional instructional mode.

Initially, our daughter was missing the group leader’s feedback. In fact, the leader was encouraging the kids to share their impressions after exploring each station. At that point, she did realized that our daughter did not understand Italian and switched to English with her.

To be fair, the crawling-touching-rubbing nature of the activities gave plenty of tactile feedback. It was certainly fun to watch, photograph and videotape (does anyone actually use tape anymore?). Incidentally, each child has to accompanied by an adult in these shows and vice versa – an adult is admitted only with a child.

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One serious drawback of this hands-on group activity is that it is a very efficient way for kids to contract and spread viruses. In fact, our daughter came down with a nasty stomach bug the next day after the visit to the museum. We even had to call a doctor for her. A home visit from a pediatrician is a luxury that doesn’t exist in Canada, so we were pleasantly surprised by how smooth and ‘human’ this experience had been.

It does put things in perspective when I think about he quality of life in Europe and Canada.

There is no way to say which place is better for living in the most general sense. The dottoressa, who treated our daughter was very nice and caring (and did I mention she came to our home right away?!)

That is all very nice, but the doctor said that the winter is not a good time for kids in Milan. The pollution is so high, that she said she always suggests leaving the city and going to the lakes “to breathe fresh air” at every opportunity. There is certainly a nasty flu going around the city. The doctor said the things would improve by March, when the weather changes. There is no ignoring the fact that we now live in a large, noisy, crowded, polluted city. The contrast with Victoria is particularly striking. Over there, we take the cleanliness of the air and the streets for granted.

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Drinking water is another thing that is very different here. A waitress asked us after learning that we were from Canada: “Is it true that the water in BC is so delicious that you can drink it right from the tap?” Yes, you actually can. Here in Milan, this is an impossibility. No restaurant serves tap water, and people use enormous numbers of plastic. Empty plastic bottles is the main material that children use for DIY projects in our daughter’s school.

It is a curious disbalance: the European lifestyle is distinctly more progressive, socially responsible, cultured and sustainable than the North American one in some respects, while distinctly backward in others. Some of the details that make up the country’s way of life are impossible to notice during a short visit. It takes living here over a substantial time period to start interacting with the place in more meaningful ways: finding were to buy good food, how to get plain point A to point B efficiently, how to call a doctor and where to go with a child on a rainy weekend.

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Sabbatical as an intermediate disturbance

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I am not going to say that going on sabbatical in Milan for half a year with my family is not a great opportunity. I fully realize that, relatively speaking, it’s a privilege, and I do value it. Without exception, everyone we know, who heard about our travel for the first time, said that something ranging from “I wish I could go with you” to “It sounds like something out of a romantic novel”.

Having said this, my subjective view of the experience has been evolving from the the excitement of the initial planning, through the realization that it would take a substantial logistical effort to move the household to the stress of settling in the new town.

After everything is said and done, I absolutely think that coming here was worth the effort. Just as a note, I am writing this after living in Milan for three weeks. I will keep you updated as my opinion changes or reaffirms.

Here is one reason why academic sabbaticals are perfect mechanisms of promoting creativity and enabling a variety of viewpoints on familiar issues.

I recently read about the seminal work of Joseph Connell, a biologist, who established a framework for the so-called “intermediate disturbance hypothesis”. The idea is that in order to allow biodiversity in a certain geographical region, this area needs to be exposed to a periodic disturbance of a medium strength, like a tall tree that sometimes falls in the middle of a forest or a storm that rips through a coral reef once in a few years. The disturbance temporarily dislodges a dominant species in that area and allows other species to compete for resources (e.g. sunlight).

There are two key factors in this concept:

1. A significant disturbance is necessary for diversity (otherwise, one species would croud out the others).
2. The disturbance should not be too harsh or too frequent (otherwise, only the hardiest species would be able to survive).

Since Connell’s discovery in the 1950’s, people have drawn parallels between the intermediate disturbance hypothesis applied to biology and its apparent validity in other areas. In fact, I learned about it in Charles Duhigg’s book “Smarter Faster Better”, where he argues that it applies to a generalized creative process.

I think that an academic sabbatical, which, in the case of my university, can be taken once in every seven years, is a perfect example of a medium disturbance to the dominant modes of thinking and of dealing with everyday problems that we all have a tendency to develop and follow. Specifically, I think that travelling to a foreign country and collaborating with colleagues by physically joining their research group satisfies the key requirements of a medium disturbance.

First, going on sabbatical is undoubtedly stressful, notwithstanding all the romantic concepts of travelling to Italy or another location with an exotic flair. We are forced to adapt to the foreign customs and to learn the logistics of living in a new city. Also, joining another research group and the closeness of collaboration with other researchers compels us to internalize their viewpoints and and ways of approaching problems.

Second, the stress of sabbatical travel is not so severe that it forces us to completely uproot your way of life. Also, the sabbaticals, don’t happen too often to completely prevent routine and procedures from taking root.

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I really hope that this year’s trip will provide just enough disturbance to broaden my, and my family’s view of the world and our own life. Incidentally, I an noticing that our five-year-old daughter is definitely more adaptable to the transition to the new place than I am. For example, I am sure that if the word “stress” was in her vocabulary, she would not have chosen it to describe her initial experience here in Milan. This is the evidence that a child’s outlook to the world is inherently more diverse that that of an adult. Somewhere, along the way of growing up, one way of thinking crowds out the alternatives, just like a dominant species of plants in an Australian forest steals the sunlight from the other plants, and it takes some uprooting to open one’s mind to creative possibilities.

People in Piazza Gae Aulenti. Milan. Italy.
People in Piazza Gae Aulenti. Milan. Italy.
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Victoria to Milan with a five-year-old

Here are a few notes for travelling half-way across the globe for sabbatical with a five-year-old.

No matter how far in advance we wanted to start packing, we finished the night before our flight. Actually, my wife and I didn’t get much sleep at all that night, because we also had to prepare our house, which was being rented during our leave. Fortunately, our daughter is a good sleeper, so she had a good rest before the trip. She also likes travel – all aspects of it from packing to going to the airport to the flight itself to getting settled in the new place. This is her sixth major overseas trip, so she is a seasoned traveller by now.

Also, we learned from experience that no matter how efficient the airport workers look from a distance, luggage gets delayed far more often than we would like. This time, unfortunately, was not an exception, and one of our bags did not arrive to Milan with us. We know from experience not to pack all my stuff into one bag, all my wife’s stuff into another, etc. Instead, we pack a little bit of each family member’s clothes into each peace of the checked luggage, so if one suitcase gets lost (or hopefully just delayed), none of us is stranded without clothes. When the missing bag did show up three days later, our daughter was delighted to finally have her coloured markers, which she had already started to miss.

In terms of keeping the the child entertained, we were quite lucky and didn’t have to do much, because as I mentioned, our daughter is excited about the trip itself. She is also not a picky eater, but during the trip especially we make a point of letting her choose whatever she wanted, even if it meant pizza three times in a row.

DSC02929_01-03-2017Nothing helps the child’s mood as well as a new stuffy toy! We picked up a toy kitten at the Frankfurt airport, and our daughter didn’t let it go until the following day. We also brought another toy with us, one that was new to our daughter. It was a construction set, where you can build various shapes out of small plastic balls with hooks that attach to each other. I remember playing in a similar way with dried burs. Probably, the designers of the toy used burdock as the inspiration. Anyway, it’s a great toy for travel – lightweight and can be used in many configurations. Our daughter received it as a present for the New Year, but we asked her to keep it specifically for the trip.

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I also find that I need to entertain myself during the long trip. Usually, when I travel alone, I find that I can work quite productively on the plane and while waiting for connecting flights at airports. This time, I did not want to work because we were travelling all together, and because I was too tired from the lack of sleep to be productive anyway. Taking pictures and shooting video was a perfect way to stay somewhat focussed and entertained at the same time. I am delighted that our daughter is taking interest in photography too. She always wants to check the photos on the camera screen, asks me to take a picture of something she finds interesting and even sometimes does so herself.

We checked into the rental apartment nearly 24 hours after we left home. The first thing we did is to go out for some pizza (naturally!), and found it to be decidedly better in Milan than in Vancouver. On the way back to the apartment, we picked up some groceries, and I was once again surprised and how upbeat and positive our daughter had been despite literally falling asleep in the taxi just a couple of hours earlier. At that point in the day, it was I who needed to maintain my mood, and she was being an excellent example. So I can say that at least based on our experience, long-distance travelling with kids is not only feasible, but in many ways more enjoyable than travelling alone or as a couple.

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Exhibit setup – behind the scenes

Panoramic view of Siena. Italy.

When my wife and I came back from a 3-week-long trip from Italy in 2009, we brought back about 15,000 photos, which now seems like not a big deal, but at that time it was a huge amount and a logistical challenge in terms of storage, processing, etc.

Now, as I was re-visiting them 7 years later, to prepare an exhibit at a local coffee shop, the challenge was to select just a few images from that set and to decide how to display them them next to each other: what sizes to print, for example. So I chose my favourite photo from the entire trip – the Florentine sunset, and printed it as the larges gallery wrap I knew we would be able to display – a 24 x 36 in canvas. We brought in to the cafe, held it against the wall, and at that point in became apparent what other images would work, at what size, how to position them relative to the main print.

The rest was, as you can see in the video, a matter of sticking the hooks to the wall, after double- or triple-checking the measurements, and voilà – we have a personal exhibit!

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Analytical observation: why we like what we like

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Last year in Milan, I saw two exhibits related to Leonardo da Vinci’s work. One displayed his original notebooks, and the other, Leonardo3, showed models of his engineering designs. What impressed me the most is how much Leonardo was able to accomplish, both as an artist and as a scientist, by simply observing nature. When I think about it a little deeper, though, I realize that he was not “simply” observing the phenomena that interested him – he was was simultaneously analyzing them.

Cultivating the skill of analytical observation of everything that surrounds us is tremendously useful, even just as an exercise in concentration, which, in turn, is a basis for any deep work. One effective way of doing it is to start with things that genuinely interest you and to try to answer the question “Why am I interested in it?” For example, if it is a movie, a book or a piece of art, instead of engaging with it as a form of escapism, it would be more productive (and, arguably, more enjoyable) to think about what makes the object so interesting while we are watching/reading/observing it.

In fact, I think there are three questions that set up a framework for analysis on any piece of creative work, from a piece of art to a scientific paper. Cal Newport identified them as part of his process of reviewing technical papers.

  1. What is the main point of the work (what makes it good/interesting)?
  2. What makes it different from other works (books/photographs/research projects)?
  3. What techniques were used to achieve the result?

Perhaps, applying this framework to our everyday activities, would put us at risk of making everything we do too mechanical, robbing us of the joy of doing thing purely for fun, without any agenda. On the other hand, this can be a way to a more mindful way of doing things we like and in the process learning about these things and about ourselves.

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Storytelling using a smartphone

Evernote Camera Roll 20160121 162348I am writing this post on the plane on my way back to Victoria from Milan, where I was attending a PhD defense and presenting a seminar on using flow visualization in fluid mechanics research. Usually, I try to combine these kind of work trips with photography, but taking some time between work to go on photo shoots. The last time I did this with a particular focus was during a trip to Shanghai.

For this trip to Milan, for the first time in a while, I did not bring a DSLR. The trip was going to be very short, so I thought that it would be appropriate to test the “nimble photography” mode (the term was coined by Derek Story, the author of the first photography podcast that I ever listened to). I brought just by iPhone 6 Plus, which has an excellent camera and, unlike my 1 Dx, allows instant sharing of the photos.
Well, I can report that I did a lot less less photography during this trip than I usually do. When I did take photos, they were mostly snapshots. Also, and perhaps most importantly, I found that I lacked the habit (and consequently, the skill) of instantly sharing the photos, so I didn’t make much use of the iPhones connectedness, other than sending snapshots of my dinner plates featuring risotto alla Milanese and other “produtto tipico” to my wife.
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Having said this, rapid communication is a skill, and I believe it is a matter of practice to develop it and turn it into a habit. I saw this in action when I went to see “Rigoletto” at la Scala on the last evening of my trip. Before the third act, Russell Crowe showed up with his entourage and proceeded to the Platea. As soon as he entered he took out his phone, snapped a few pictures of the interior of the concert hall and Twitted one of the ceiling with just a couple of words as a subtitle: “la Scala… Verdi’s Rigoletto”. He was very unapologetic and matter-of-fact about this, even though the “house rules” website of la Scala is explicit about not bringing phones to the hall. This is the rule that almost everyone, including myself, ignored anyway.
Thinking about it, I realized that what Mr. Crowe did was, legitimately, story telling. Granted, what he wrote was not “War and Piece”, but it was absolutely better than nothing. It is just like showing up for just the last act of the opera is better than not showing up at all.

Perhaps, we, as human beings, are evolionary, programmed to like storytelling, both as tellers and as listeners. I think this is related to being good at transmitting useful information, that enable survival of our cave-dwelling ancestors. So, regarding the tools of the visual storytelling trade (i.e. an iPhone vs. a DSLR), bringing a professional-grade tool compels us to take the picture-taking seriously, but can detract from the actual experience (e.g. I might have decided to go for a nigh photoshoot instead of the Scala if had lugged the backpack-full of photo gear half way around the world) and therefore limit the storytelling opportunities.
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Sunsets: noticing beauty of common events

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“Clouds come floating into my life, no longer to carry rain or usher storm, but to add color to my sunset sky.”
― Rabindranath Tagore, Stray Birds

Visual impressions are inherently subjective, so it is a fundamental challenge to prescribe a recipe for an “impressive” photograph, either in terms of the subject or the technique. The are some guidelines, though, that can increase the chances of a particular image being noticed or stirring emotions in people. Typically, these guidelines are rooted in human phychology, more specifically, in phychologycal traits that have developed through years of evolution.

One such trait is that rare events have more emotional impact than common ones. For example, sunsets are more spectacular than solar eclipses, but the latter ones are more memorable, because they are far less common.

Photographers are in a unique position to make even commonplace events memorable. One way to make everyday events more impressive is to highlight their exceptional surroundings or circumstances. For example, I don’t notice the splendor of most everyday sunsets in my home town, but I remember every detail of the one my wife and I watched from Piazzale Michelangelo in Florence during our first trip there.

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