My thoughts on the craft, the process and the subjects
My daughter’s make-believe stories often involve a nemesis, in the form of a mischievous cat, from which the main character, played by herself, needs to be protected. So here is the continuation of the illustrated story of the Girl and the Egg.
“It was not an easy job – taking care of the Egg. It had to be kept warm. Not too hot and not too cool, but just right. Bit most importantly, the Girl had to watch out for the Cat, who was always looking to steal the Egg when the Girl was not watching.”
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.”
I notice that I am becoming largely weather-independent in nearly everything I do in my daily life. I am guessing that this is true for many people, at least those living in developed countries and working outside of agriculture, air transportation, etc. Civilization enables us to keep our routines regardless of weather changes, but deep down, there is some evolutionary awareness and emotional connection to the natural phenomena in all their forms.
On a day like today, it takes a conscious consideration of the possibility of being caught in the rain when deciding to take a ride across town. Continuing with my exercise of documenting my short rides, I made my way to the highly recommended Habit Cafe in the downtown – my incentive to sticking with this personal project. On the way, I stopped at a lookout point to admire clouds over the ocean.
Habits are powerful, and that is both good and bad. They enable us to function efficiently, but they also reduce present-moment awareness and reduce our ability to make creative decisions. Ironically, breaking a habit often involves (indeed, requires) forming a new one.
When I was a graduate student, one professor, who eagerly embraced new-at-the-time participation of students in the class by video conference, said that he would try any change of lecture format just to get away from the stereotypical classroom routine.
I am also using the rides as an opportunity to practice iPhone-photography. Today, I stopped by the Cattle Point, a spot that made me fall in love with Victoria when I first visited it many years ago. The weather was beautiful, but the light was too harsh to make good photos. Here are a couple of shots, post-processed in the app called Snapspeed, while I was drinking coffee at the Hide and Seek Cafe, which I chose precisely because I’ve never been there before. The coffee, by the way, was excellent.
As a professor, I am always looking for ways to connect to students, to find common points of interest beyond the classroom. These connections translate into a more human approach to teaching (or at least, so I hope). During my first year of teaching, I was lucky to have a student in my class, who has just joined our kendo club. Just knowing that we share the common interest helped tremendously in establishing the rapport with the entire class. Yesterday, I rode my bike for the first time this year, and several of the students, who came to my office, saw the helmet on my shelf and told me that they also ride bikes.
Adam Grant in his book “Originals
And side projects that are pushed alongside the main job don’t have to be small in scope or amateurish. Perhaps more importantly, the hobby projects can be very satisfying even we don’t have goal of developing them into full-time jobs. Just yesterday, I had an opportunity to photograph a heavy metal band, in which my kendo friend is playing a bass guitar. All of the band members have “normal” lives outside of the hard rock world, but when their makeup is on and they go onstage they make a tangible contribution to the community, which is obvious in the reaction of the loyal fans, who gather around them. I personally had a great fun at the concert, mostly just through exposure to an atmosphere that is quite foreign to my typical photoshoot routine. After all, I am not often concerned about being sprayed with fake blood from stage effects while trying to compose a shot.
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.)
In martial arts, for example, in kendo, the term zanshin (literally, ‘remaining spirit’) refers to the state of being brepared to continue to fight immediately after completing a sword cut. At one seminar, an 8th dan kendo sensei explained that this continuous focus and the abcense of breaks in the present moment awareness is the reason why a match that lasts only a few minutes leaves the kendoka dripping with sweat.
I find it interesting that the concept applies equally to a positive result (completion of a painting, receiving a promotion, publishing a research paper, winning a kendo match, etc.) and a negative one (harsh review of a paper, losing a match, etc.) In either case, as soon as you find out the outcome, it becomes a thing of the past. After that, it is time to move on to the next thing.
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.
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.
I am writing this on a ferry on my way to a kendo tournament – the largest annual competition that I attend. For amateur kendoka like myself, there is always a question of whether the shiai experience (which often ends after a single lost match in my case) is worth all the inconvenience of getting there, not to mention the stress of the competition. I was thinking about this again this morning, sitting in the dark, waiting for my ride to the first ferry sailing of the day. I think that the reason we do it (practice kendo and go to tournaments) is to experience The Way (the ‘Do’ in “kendo’). It has an unmistakable flavour of the sacred, something deeply spiritual. Just as craftsmen, we do not need to create the reason to follow the way – it is already imbedded in the process itself.
