120 The Time has Come, The Walrus said…
The time has come, the walrus said,
to talk of many things:
of shoes and ships and sealing wax
of cabbages and kings
and why the sea is boiling hot
and whether pigs have wings.
Well, I’m back from a two week-trip to Taos, New Mexico. It was an invigorating rut-breaker. You might think that being semi-retired would automatically set one free of ruts, but not so as some Wizard of Id characters so clearly point out.
However, it’s not always easy to get away like that (like to distant places), so one must look for substitutes closer to home. One of the best ways to escape life’s tedium is closer to home than home, it is in the mind. Attitude, curiosity, interest, enthusiasm, discovery, awareness — those are all mental attributes that keep one alive and fresh and growing.
When my wife, Dee, and I go on a trip, she drives every inch of the way (she likes to) while I sketch (at 65 to 70 mph — that will sharpen your senses); or I read short stories or positive thinking stuff aloud. New scenery is always invigorating. It’s a first time experience that seems to reveal its contents in a flash. It’s like revving up an engine to 75 mph to loosen the carbon collected there, and blowing it out the exhaust. First time experiences cleanse your senses. They break down habit plaque, clarifying seeing and thinking.
Well, when I got home, I looked around me and the people and the landscape were seen afresh as if I were traveling in foreign territory. So traveling is a major means of getting a soul massage. But what about those of us (meaning you) who have to go through long grueling periods of work and overtime. Diversity is hard to come by. And that’s when it is needed most. One substitute is to travel vicariously. There’re often excellent travel shows on television. Novels have a way of transporting us to distant places as if by magic. You can go to Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and then to far off places with Travis McGee as he carries out his Clint Eastwood type adventures in John D. MacDonald’s exciting series. You can go to New Mexico via Tony Hillerman’s books as his Navajo Indian cop takes you into the desert canyons in pursuit of the villain. They are sprinkled with Indian culture and legends.
Paintings, drawings, and cartoons have a renewing potion in them. If you feel the need of a new look at the world — study an artist you have neglected. Read up on him, research his methods, his way of life, his attitude toward life and art. Buy a newspaper or The New Yorker and study the cartoons. Don’t just settle for laughs but study how different cartoonists have slanted their unique versions of life and humor. And of course, continue to watch animation and live action films always with a fresh view and purpose.
When I was in high school I took a class in motion picture study. In it I learned to judge and study films with four things in mind: story, direction, acting, and photography. There are many more ingredients in film making, but these things are basic (about all I could ever handle anyway). They gave purpose to my viewing pleasure. It sometimes led to boredom while others around me were enjoying a show, but I always figured that discrimination is an upward path. To settle for the mediocre is like dining at a fast food place. There’s nothing wrong with being critical as long as it’s for a constructive purpose. If we settle for mediocrity then mediocrity will find a welcome haven in our own work.
Reading, observing, analyzing, and studying new things are all good substitutes for traveling to new territories. They will help to blow the carbon out of your brains and keep your interest and curiosity always in sharp shape. Drift along, and ennui, arrested vision, stale thinking, and habit will envelop you. Tee Hee, that great teacher and lovable guy, advised: never drive home by the same route twice, but if you must, look at the surroundings anew each time. Get in the habit of treating every experience as a first time happening. Observe, observe, observe. Be like a sponge — suck up all the knowledge you can. William Mallack, on station KPFK, said the other day that “It’s best to know a few things thoroughly than a lot of things in a shallow way.” I disagree, partially. An artist has to be knowledgeable in many things: drawing (which is complicated enough in itself), acting, story, direction, physics, logics, music, drama, comedy, etc. Plus a sprinkling of philosophy and psychology to keep it all in reasonable balance. In your business you don’t have to know all that stuff thoroughly, but you do have to have a smattering of it. Of course the clincher is this: There’s not much you can do with any of that knowledge unless you can draw well enough to express it, which emboldens me to offer some advice: LEARN TO DRAW.
I would like to share one person’s progress in learning to draw. Her training was in commercial art — rendering, lettering, layout, etc. – but she has decided to study drawing and animation. Her first attempts were matchstick figures. For starters, I encouraged her to use two matchsticks to show a thickness to the forms:
This encouraged her to think of the shapes as having volume. Then to simplify those bewildering complicated gestures, I suggested thinking of the torso as the base of the figure. It locates the figure on the paper, establishes the basic pose, and it establishes a place to attach the arms, legs, and neck. (It makes me almost weep to watch, night after night, artists attaching arms and legs onto a blank spot on the paper, then later having to draw the body to fit those connection points.)
There were no long-standing bad habits to break. She very early began seeing in the round for she was introduced to thinking of foreshortened limbs as cylinders advancing into the picture plane. Right off, she was drawing her figures in space rather than copying the outline of the model. I won’t venture to guess what the future holds for her, but I am impressed with her progress in the evening class to this point. Let’s hear a round of applause for Wendy Werner, and a wish for continued growth. The following are some of her recent drawings.
