Posts

Posted on

To undo or not to undo

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

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

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

Posted on

Snow day

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

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

Posted on

Crossing cultures

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted on

Still life

My daughter’s art teacher suggested a way of developing observation skills: setting up little still lives everywhere (at home using toys, at restaurants, at the playground) and drawing them either right on the spot or later, from memory. I thought it would be a neat exercise to try for myself, and yesterday I did it for the first time. I was sitting at my favourite cafe in the morning when I noticed that the direction of the shadow from a water glass on the table accidentally lined up with the milk pattern on the surface of my latte.

I cheated bit in terms of memory training – instead of sketching the scene right there and then or tying to remember it in detail, I snapped a picture on my phone and used it later as a reference for sketching.

Posted on

Developing new skills

At the last tournament, I repeatedly tried to hit the opponent’s kote (lower arm just above the wrist), but judges gave me no ippons for any of the hits. I think this is because my strikes were not sharp enough. There is a particular quality of hits that’s needed to score points in kendo. It is not the force that counts, or even not the speed per se, although speed is important. It is precisely sharpness, snappiness of the hit. And I cannot do it at my current level. At least not consistently.

This presents a conundrum that applies beyond kendo to learning any new skill: how do you practice something that you cannot (correctly) do yet? If you practice using your current, incorrect, form, you risk reinforcing bad habits.

One option is to break down the skill into its constituent parts and work on them one-by-one before trying to connect them. This is how I work on the basics of violin-playing: First, work on the rhythm of a new song using a single open string. Second, get the left hand into position for playing correct notes without paying attention to rhythm or quality of sound. Third, focus on the sound quality (bow movement). Fourth, try to connect everything together and circle back to the rhythm.

In the case of a kote strike, however, the overall motion is already so short and simple that it doesn’t make sense to break it down further. But the overall quality of my kote hit is lacking, so something needs to be done. According to my sensei, the answer is to practice a different, but related, motion, which will eventually support and enable whatever you are trying to perform. In the case of the kote strike, the supporting exercise is matavari suburi – large-amplitude, straight swing of the shinai with maximum speed and an abrupt stop at the end of the swing. I’ve began doing it as my morning warm-up, but haven’t done enough yet to see any qualitative difference in my kote strikes. If anything, it will teach me not to over-extend my elbows at the end of a strike – something that’s annoyingly painful and potentially dangerous.

Posted on

The best part of tournaments

In the past, when we went to kendo tournaments, driving at 5:30 am through the dark town on the way to catch the first ferry to Vancouver, we used to joke that it takes some kind of especially weird people to willingly get up that early and go somewhere to get hit by bamboo sticks, while having others scrutinize every inch of our movements. I think somewhere along the way I myself bought into this story and lost track of why we actually like doing this. I stopped noticing the best part of tournaments that makes all these things worth it.

It took me physically going to a tournament yesterday (lack of enthusiasm being no match to the force of habit) to recall what the best part of the competition was. For me personally, it is not winning matches (I wish it was one of the reasons, but unfortunately I mostly lose my matches), but the experience as a whole. I realized that I like meeting up early to carpool to the ferry, talking about kendo over ferry food, noticing the sunrise over the islands through the window and running to the upper deck with the camera to take some shots of it. And then, at the tournament, searching for my name in the lineup (it is fun to realize that I recognize many names after the years), feeling how adrenaline pushes away sleepiness right before my match, taking photos, watching matches, trying to see if I follow, and agree with, the shinpan’s decisions. On the way back, more kendo talk – what went wrong (inevitably), how things are not like they used to be, what we need to work on.

Overall, I am glad that we can to it every now and then. The actual best part? It’s hard to put a finger on. If pressed, I would have to say, it’s hanging out with others, who, for some weird reason, also find value in being hit with bamboo sticks.

Posted on

Contrast

In the spirit of paying attention to beautiful little things throughout the day, I snapped a picture of snowdrop flowers by the sidewalk. Somehow, they looked incredibly white and fresh, but not neat and pretty. The last few days/weeks were rainy, and the flowers were splattered with mud. I found another bunch of snowdrops nearby that were a bit cleaner, but for some reason, when I took a photo, it didn’t have the same sense of freshness.

I think it’s the actual mud that made the snowdrops look prettier by contrast – another reminder that context makes all the difference.

This reminded me of the essay called “In Praise of Shadows” by Junichiro Tanizaki. He talks there about the importance of shadows in accentuating bright elements of design in Japanese architecture, among other things. Looking a bit closer, he uses a juxtaposition of western and eastern cultures to showcase the latter – kind of a meta-contrast. It is fascinating and continuously surprising, a bit like the Japanese culture itself.

Posted on

Learning to see

“The camera is an instrument that teaches people to see without a camera.”
— Dorothea Lange

I’ve been watching a video of Richard Feynman’s lecture on the laws of physics, and he described the essence of the scientific approach like this: “This is the key of modern science, this is the beginning of the true understanding of nature – this idea that to look at the thing, to record the details and to hope that in the information thus obtained may lie a clue to one or another of a possible theoretical interpretation.”

The ability to observe is of primary importance both in science and in art. Leonardo da Vinci, who was an exceptionally keen observer, is a stunning example of a genius straddling both fields. There is some evidence that he, in fact, made no distinction between the two. Feynman also drew and played drums. He said at the beginning of his lecture at Cornell that somehow physicists and mathematicians always mentioned his artistic interests, but when he played drums at a club, no-one ever said that he was also a theoretical physicist. He attributed it to higher appreciation of arts compared to science.

The good thing is that the capacity for observation is a trainable skill. One exercise for developing it is to take photos of various random objects throughout the day. The idea is that the mere act of looking for subjects to take pictures of encourages us to be more tuned to our surroundings. I’ve decided to put to to practice and snapped a picture of a tree with multiple trunks as I was walking across campus yesterday. Then, I thought that it would be even better to turn it into a sketch. Here is the result – made on an iPad in ProCreate with an Apple Pencil.

Posted on

Splash dance

We have an ongoing research project in our lab, where we take closeup photos of droplets of water colliding with each other. The initial motivation was to explore the connection between fluid mechanics and visual arts. This week, we used water splashes a a special effect for a tap dance photo shoot. We didn’t pursue any science per se, but the artistic connection was even stronger, as dance is an art in itself, and photography is an artistic way of expressing it!

When I first started photographing dance performances, I thought that still images would be far inferior to video in the context of dance. After all, video direccaptures music and motion, which are both essential elements of the dance. But as I took more and more dance photos, I realized that the photos have something that the video doe not have – the ability to freeze the motion and to give the audience time to appreciate the fine details of it. If you think carefully, one of the aspects that makes a photograph interesting is offering the viewer a perspective that is not commonly available in real life. With sport photography, for example, the most interesting images show athletes up-close, at the moment of intense physical effort – something that a spectator cannot see from their seats. Likewise, during a dance performance, anyone in the audience can hear the music and see how synchronized the motions of the dancers are. But when the motion is stopped in a photograph, we have a chance to appreciate the details that are are too fleeting to notice otherwise.

This is exactly what makes high-speed photography of water splashes valuable from a scientific standpoint. It is a way to examine the details of the fluid motion that normally happen very fast.

So combining splashes and dance makes a perfect case for creating interesting photos. Typically, we see both dancers and water droplets in motion, so it is fun looking at either (or both, in this case) frozen in time.

Posted on

On dedication

As I am going through the photo coverage of the dance classes that take place throughout the year in the studio where my daughter practices, I continue to be amazed by the level of dedication shown by the senior, but still very young, students. I see them at the studio after school literally day in and day out. Hopefully, the photos will help balance the impression one might get by observing only their year-end show that skills and grace, which they demonstrate on stage, are effortless. The result might be graceful, and working towards it is fun, but the effort is certainly paid upfront both by the students and by their teachers.

And I think the fact that the dancers are engaged in training every day plays a large role in sustaining their motivation. I’ve been thinking about the value of daily practice, incremental progress and the attitude of creating a body of work for a while, but it has been very satisfying today to come across a quote of someone widely regarded as a genius that perfectly resonates with this idea:

“Either once only, or every day. If you do something once it’s exciting, and if you do it every day it’s exciting. But if you do it, say, twice or almost every day, it’s not good any more.” – Andy Warhol.