I drew the drawing and wrote the commentary 7 years ago today. Still true.
Original
I fancy myself a pretty good thinker. But considering almost all my napkin drawings start with a quote that I myself did not make up, it would be disingenuous of me to say I come up with all original ideas.
Unique
However, I do believe I am unique thinker. A unique thinker isn’t someone who thinks up something out of the blue. Instead it is someone who takes these ideas from others and combines them, mixes them, bakes them into a uniquely stated idea. Not necessarily a new idea, but an idea that has been thought through by one unique individual and come out the other side with something no one else can give it, the perspective and expression of that one person.
Finding Oneself
I think a lot of young people who are unformed in their own identity don’t understand what this means. I see it all the time on reality TV shows like American Idol. The judges say to the young person, ‘you have to just be yourself’ or ‘you have to put your own spin on it’ or ‘you just need to find your own voice’.
The least mature of the singers look blankly back at the judges, having no idea what it is they are talking about. They don’t know yet how to take another idea, (another song in this case) and make it their own because there is no ‘own’ there yet. They are doing their best to imitate a great singer but they don’t know yet how to become a great singer themselves.
Pride
The originality of your ideas isn’t as original as you probably think and it is not what you should have pride in. It is what should endow you with humility. How you take what is given to you from the outside and transform it into something uniquely yours, THAT is what you can have true pride in.
I drew the drawing and wrote the commentary 6 years ago today. Still true.
Signs of Life
My post yesterday showed a woman watching TV in the dark, pretty much unmotivated and inactive in life. She was leading a mediocre life and I illustrated it by showing her being idle while the world passed her by. But the truth is being idle is not necessarily a sign of mediocrity. It’s mostly a sign of nothing. It’s just something we all do. We all have times we are idle, not pursuing some grand goal. We just sit and read a light novel, or watch a funny TV show, or listen to frothy infectious pop music. If you have a drive to achieve something, a drive to be excellent at something, then that idle time is good. It is needed to rejuvenate your ideas, your creativity, your energy.
Signs of Death
But if you are living a mediocre life, a life unmotivated and without a flame of excellence then that same idleness is a killer. It is not rejuvenating you, it is burying you. It is helping you to die while you are still alive. So ask yourself – Are you taking a breather at the end of a long day? Then you are in good company, most of us like to do that. Or are you taking a breather from life? Then you might want to slap yourself awake and see if you might not want to pursue something greater than the killing mediocrity of never ending idleness.
Real Life
When I mentioned on twitter this morning that I was drawing a woman with curlers in her hair my friend and fellow running coach Theresa thought I might need some inspiration so she sent me a photo of herself in curlers. She says she sometimes will even stop at a convenience store to get something while in her curlers AND has been hit on a number of times. She says it has to do with her confidence, that she is who she is and likes it, curlers or not! I have to agree, that’s what confidence is all about!
Trivia Question from yesterday answered
Question: A man known to many as ‘The most hated man in America’ was suppose to be on the Titanic but missed the boat. Who was he and why did he miss it?
Answer: Henry Clay Frick. He was the chairman of Andrew Carnegie’s steel company and was the man in charge of the violent response to a worker’s strike in 1892 at the Homestead Steel Plant. As a result of that he became widely hated in the US. He and his wife, Adelaide, were ticketed to be aboard the Titanic but she sprained her ankle in Italy shortly before the voyage and they were not able to make the crossing.
Drawing in church (or anywhere) is not restricted to drawing something or someone I am looking at. Here are 5 examples of the range, from starting with a real person but adding a made-up background to doing something abstract that has no connection to a world outside itself.
The Violinist’s Hand
The drawing is of a real person…sorta. She is the violinist in church that I draw frequently. But I am not being hired to draw her portrait so I am not particularly concerned about it looking exactly like her. I have certain parts that I hope I get right and I work at that, but just like an author will tell you, sometimes the character takes on a life of their own. In the artist’s case, the lines made and the colors chosen have reasons, some known some unknown, that go beyond a likeness to the individual and into an idea, feeling or mood.
The background obviously isn’t from church. I created it to build on the idea of her looking off in the distance and hoping for help. After I drew the background I came up with what she might be thinking. I penned that in and was going to leave the last word off but then thought it would be interesting to finish the quote with a visual instead of a word.
The Stained Glass Singer
Here is another example of starting with a person, in this case a choir member. This time it looks like I went even further away from a standard portrait but it didn’t start that way.
That happened later, when I was in my studio studying the drawing. That is when I started to see the facets in her face and thought about defining them. I have done that many times before over the decades and it’s always a fun exercise to work on.
But what made it special this time was realizing that building those up could turn her into a stained glass window. It seems like a perfect thing to do.
Sad Girl
The only thing remotely connected to a real person here is a general shape of the face, but even that is exaggerated. It was just a shape I saw and remembered as I passed someone in the hall of the church.
The rest of the drawing I wasn’t looking at anybody or thinking about anyone in particular. The initial line drawing of the shape gave me a melancholy feeling so I drew the rest of the portrait to match that.
I chose the blue and yellow stripes of the hair first. The shirt was a solid at that point but I felt one solid block of color would be too heavy at the bottom. I liked the idea of something bridging the two sides of her so I added stripes to the shirt. It also allowed me to create a sense of volume to her body.
Sometimes a situation arises that causes you to make a decision you otherwise would not make. I started filling in the pink background on the left and slowly realized the marker was running out of ink. In most cases I would just refill but I didn’t have any refill ink. So, I had to consider what could I do on the opposite side if I wasn’t going to use the same color. I liked the idea of using a cool color to break up the symmetry of the image and to cast a different mood to the two different sides so I went with a pale green.
At the very end I did not like the big blank space between her eyes and her mouth so I decided to add her blushing. It seemed just the right finishing touch to the image and her melancholy.
The Aliens
Sometimes the distance between what you start with and what you end with is light years away. I ended with a couple of goofy aliens landing on earth. But what I started with was a breast.
I had this idea, yes while in church, of a nude woman floating in the air. So, I drew a breast to start. I realize two things at this point. One, I made the breast too big to make my idea of a whole person floating feasible and two, church might not be the best place to draw this image even if it did fit.
So, what to do? I contemplated what I had and saw a possible space ship. One shaped like a flying breast it’s true but I figured I could make that not so apparent.
And of course a space ship has to have aliens so I decided to make them look like bumbling boobs, just for fun.
Spiral #7
Sometimes I am completely in my head at church, not looking at anything. This is the case with this drawing of spirals, one of a series I have been doing lately.
While it is completely abstract (meaning no reference to anything beyond itself) that does not mean I am not considering the possible ideas that might come from the drawing.
In this case I was very deliberate about having the four quadrants be mirror images of the diagonal quadrant and to have the colors be the same. At this point my thoughts are about how the colors are reflecting groups of people and how they interact – tribes, colonies, and yes churches.
That doesn’t mean I expect someone looking at this drawing to see that, or to see anything at all. It’s just where my mind meanders as I am creating these sorts of images.
The great thing about art, and in particular abstract art, is that everyone is right in their opinion. There is no absolute truth in art. What you want it to mean, it means.
In 2017 I drew this in the cafe of the church I attend. I finished the drawing today, just about 2 years later.
When I made all the thought bubbles in the drawing I as thinking of what they could all be thinking that would make them unique and similar at the same time and the idea of numbers came to mind. We frequently think in numbers, even if we don’t realize it so I started writing down various numbers that we get attached to and sometimes obsess about; money, age, time, distance, size, temperature are just a few.
I showed this on my live stream as I was drawing it and one person commented, ‘Eternity isn’t a number.’ And he is right. But it is a concept of time and time is all about numbers so it still fits. Plus I did the drawing at a church, where the idea of eternity is talked about probably more than any other place.
