Notes on writing and drawing

Remember your heroes

Tuesday, January 9, 2018

This is one of my favorite pages from the new 2018 calendar. (You may recognize it from the journal, too.)

I’ve always kept pictures of my heroes above my desk to keep watch over me, like guardian spirits, to remind me who I want to be. These days they help me remember who I wanted to be when I first got started.

Man, there are so many things to push you off your path. Maybe you get a taste of success and say, “Oh, well now it’s time to get serious.” Or maybe you fall into a career you didn’t plan on. Maybe people start lumping you in with some contemporaries you never asked to be lumped in with. Maybe somebody dangles some easy-looking money at you. In my experience, at some point you will wonder what the heck you’re doing and what you should do next.

Your heroes can help. Much depends, of course, on the quality of one’s heroes, but looking to them can help you get re-aligned with yourself. Sometimes it’s a stern look to say, “Stop f***ing this up.” Sometimes it’s a wink, to say “keep going, baby.” (Some of them you need at eye level, which is why I have Queen Lynda keeping watch over my writing desk.)

One of my favorite writer/directors, Billy Wilder, he kept a sign in his office that reminded him of his mentor, Ernst Lubitsch, “How would Lubitsch do it?”

(The Paris Review asked him, “Well, how did he do it?” and part of Wilder’s answer was: “It’s funny, but we noticed that whenever he came up with an idea, I mean a really great idea, it was after he came out of the can. I started to suspect that he had a little ghostwriter in the bowl of the toilet there.”)

Anyways. Remember your heroes. They can help.

Getting things done

Friday, January 5, 2018

It’s a new year, so naturally people are regretting all the things they didn’t get done last year, and thinking about all the things they want to get done this year.

A friend of mine messaged me this week and asked me what I think about bullet journaling, and I, ever the helpful friend, said, “I don’t think about bullet journaling.”

Another friend sent me this article making a case for using a paper planner.

I’ve gotten a handful of tweets recently asking me about “productivity systems,” which is funny to me because it assumes I do any thinking at all about productivity. Productivity is pretty low on my list of cares. “Productivity is for machines, not for people,” Jason Fried recently tweeted. “Think about how effective you’re being, not how productive you’re being.”

Some people tell me they have all these great ideas, and they just can’t get it together enough to make them happen. I am envious of these people, because I do not feel full of great ideas. I have plenty of faith in my ability to do something with a great idea, should I have one, but what I do not have is any faith in my ability to actually generate that great idea. I spend almost all of my time trying to have an idea worth doing something about.

Anyways. The best thing I’ve read about productivity is still David Allen’s classic, Getting Things Done. It’s way more Zen than its cover might suggest, and it’s full of little nuggets like, “If it’s on your mind, your mind isn’t clear,” and “Get the ideas out of your head so you can do something with them.” Allen’s advice, as far as a system goes, is: “All you really need is lists and folders.” You need a list of stuff you want to do, and you need a place to put things so you can get to them later. Nothing fancy. I make do with a Google Calendar, Dropbox, a couple of to-do list pages in the back of my notebook, a filing cabinet, and banker’s boxes.

Really, the best way I know to see something through is to get yourself a calendar, put an X in the day’s box after you do your work, and don’t break the chain.

And maybe stop worrying so much about productivity and getting things done. Worry about things worth doing.

You receive what you’re ready to receive

Thursday, January 4, 2018

A thought from Thoreau’s journal, on this day, January 4th, 1860:

A man receives only what he is ready to receive…. We hear and apprehend only what we already half know. If there is something which does not concern me, which is out of my line, which by experience or by genius my attention is not drawn to, however novel and remarkable it may be, if it is spoken we hear it not, if it is written, we read it not, or if we read it, it does not detain us. Every man thus tracks himself through life, in all his hearing and reading and observation and traveling. His observations make a chain. The phenomenon or fact that cannot in any wise be linked with the rest which he has observed, he does not observe. By and by we may be ready to receive what we cannot receive now.

Receiving, here, means a taking in, or a welcoming, as you’d receive a visitor. This is, to my mind, a good argument for self-directed learning, for following one’s nose, so to speak, as we take in best what we want to take in. (Although almost anyone who’s been taught has been haunted by the words of their teachers, which often only make sense in time.) People learn best what and when they want to learn. The first step to thinking, according to my friend Alan, is to want to think in the first place.

Reading, for example: We must be ready to take in a book. I am fond of the saying “It wasn’t for me” to describe a book I didn’t connect with, because it allows that given enough time, it may be for me, and I may be ready to receive it. We are always changing, so we will find new things to receive when re-reading. Thoreau follows up with a specific example, about Aristotle and fishes:

I find (e.g.) in Aristotle something about the spawning of the pout & perch — because I know something about it already & have my attention aroused — but I do not discover till very late that he has made other equally important observations on the spawning of other fishes, because I am not interested in those fishes.

Reading is a part of our education, and education is a drawing out of who we are and what we care about. We meet ourselves in the words of others.

Earlier in his journal, Thoreau is observing the snow, and how the presence of tracks reveals formally undetected animals. So he already has tracking on the mind, and turns the idea on himself: He’s tracking himself in his journal, in his reading, in his observing. (As A.K.R. said, “Pay attention to what you pay attention to.”) Part of his work is examining his own chain, adding links, identifying the weak ones, fortifying others…

Caveman drawings

Wednesday, December 27, 2017

Our two-year-old, Jules, our little caveman, started drawing dozens of skeletons a few days ago, and in response to my posts about them, an Instagram follower commented, “They’re like ancient cave drawings.” I immediately thought of the work of Sylvia Fein, a painter who wrote two really interesting books about children’s artwork: Heidi’s Horse, a record of her daughter’s drawings of horses from the ages of 2 to 17, and First Drawings: Genesis of Visual Thinking, which compares children’s drawings to the cave paintings and drawings of our ancestors. The books can be hard to track down, so here are a few examples from First Drawings, below:

I love these books because they honor the work of children’s drawing — their play — by paying close attention to it, and they show how the development of children’s visual thinking echoes the development of our species’ visual thinking. Children do the work of developing powers that we have evolved over thousands of years, all in the span of a decade or two.

I also love these books because they are about intense looking and observation, and they explore their arguments through simple juxtaposition. I know of at least two other books — both favorites of mine — that use this method: David Hockney’s Secret Knowledge, which compares post-photography painting to medieval pre-optics paintings, and Norman Brosterman’s Inventing Kindergarten, which compares the art of kindergarteners to the art of modernist artists and architects.

Sylvia Fein is a terrific painter who, to my knowledge, is still working at the age of 98. Here’s a 2014 documentary about her life and work. There’s a wonderful moment when she speaks of discovering working in miniature when her daughter was very little: “I was just in heaven. Everything seemed to go together: my life and my painting.” I’m inspired by the way Fein was able to integrate motherhood and art-making. (Above is my favorite painting of hers, obviously a self-portrait, from 1947, called “Lady With Her Baby.”)

The only thing remotely similar to Fein’s book Heidi’s Horse that I can think of is a 1939 exhibit at the MoMA, Creative Growth, Childhood to Maturity, which showcased the work of Dahlov Ipcar, from the age 3 to 22. (She was, by the way, the first woman with a solo exhibition at MoMA.) Ipcar’s parents, William Zorach and Marguerite Zorach, were both artists, and they saved much of the artwork she made as a young child. The press release of the show outlines a goal very similar to Heidi’s Horse: “it shows the creative growth from infancy to adulthood of an individual who is neither a genius nor a prodigy.”

Ipcar wrote about her unique upbringing in her essay, “My Family, My Life, My Art”:

My parents had always encouraged me to develop my own style of art. They both had undergone conventional art school training, but when they became involved in the modern art movement, they found they had to unlearn everything they had been taught…. They had deliberately left me unschooled in art, wanting to see what would happen if I were left alone to develop in my own way.

Ipcar and Fein share another connection: they both found a way to integrate their life and art-making. It came naturally to Ipcar, who recalled painting in the studio alongside her mother, and later, painting with her own children:

People always ask me how I managed to paint when my two boys were small. My children were a joy to me, and there was no problem working with them around — I just let them play at my feet as I painted. They would even run toy fire engines up and down my easel, but it didn’t bother me.

This is very much what I am attempting here, at the kitchen table, at this very moment, while the two boys draw quietly beside me, long enough for me to press “Publish.”

X-rays

Tuesday, December 26, 2017

Several times a day since October, ever since the Halloween decorations went up, my two-year-old son Jules has asked my wife or me to draw him an “x-ray.” (That’s his word for skeleton.) When you draw for him, he hunches over so close to the drawing that you can’t even see your hand. You finish a drawing, then he turns the paper over to the blank side and says, “X-ray?” We’ve drawn hundreds of skeletons for him, over and over and over again. He flat-out refuses to attempt drawing one for himself. Sometimes we’ll be finishing dinner, and he’ll say, “X-ray?” and we’ll shout, “No! No more x-rays! We’re eating!” and he’ll throw a complete fit until one of us relents and draws the skeleton.

Then, yesterday — Christmas morning — totally out of the blue, I look over, and there’s Jules, with a piece of construction paper and his new Slick Stix from his stocking, drawing freaking x-rays like he’s been doing it his whole life:

I was so shocked I just sat there next to him for 15 minutes, watching him draw. And we’re not talking just a few x-rays, we’re talking dozens of x-rays. He’s drawn for hours since Christmas morning, as if seized by some kind of hypergraphia. X-rays, x-rays, x-rays. Here’s a picture of the whole stack of drawings he’s done so far:

What happened? What convinced him it was time? The construction paper and the markers have been there at his disposal for months. Was it that we had visitors in the house for Christmas? I can’t come up with any convincing external factor that might have caused him to finally pick up the marker. He just decided he was ready.

As is so often the case with parenting, you do the same Sisyphean, seemingly meaningless task over and over again, wondering when the heck it will add up to anything. And then, one day, often without warning or fanfare, the meaning arrives, and you still can’t believe it.