Art from Life

Tuesday, February 4, 2020

Found art from Life magazine, Jan 22, 1945, scanned by Google Books. (The words from the opposite page read: “electric America It me.”)

The cube (in praise of solvable problems)

Saturday, February 1, 2020

Years ago, we bought a big box of new doorknobs to replace the old doorknobs in the old house we were living in. Once I had my technique down, I could replace a doorknob in a couple minutes, but every door was slightly different, warped with time, so there was enough thinking involved to keep each replacement interesting. I found the process enormously satisfying. So satisfying, in fact, that I didn’t replace all the doorknobs at once. I saved a handful of doorknobs for times when I was feeling really stressed out.

When so many of life’s problems are unsolvable, solvable problems are a wonderful distraction. When so many things seem unfixable, fixing something feels amazing.

My son got a Rubik’s Cube for Christmas. Something compelled me this weekend to sit down and try to figure it out. I missed the whole craze in the 80s, so I was completely new to it. After watching an online tutorial, I discovered that there are step-by-step systems you can apply to solving it. You can actually attack it like a programmer with code: You basically look at the cube and run if/then statements in your head to find the right algorithm to apply. After the first dozen solves, I felt like I was replacing doorknobs again, except there were as many doorknobs as I wanted!

There’s something about keeping your hands busy when your brain feels broken. I have friends with depression who build elaborate LEGO sets. I’ve read about veterans with PTSD who put together gigantic jigsaw puzzles.

We’re wired to want to turn chaos into order. Randomness into meaning.

It’s why hobbies are so important…

https://www.instagram.com/p/B8Eybh5AnIG/

Collage is thinking on the page

Friday, January 31, 2020

For me, collage is the method that gets closest to depicting how I actually think on the page. (Next closest would be drawing, or, more specifically, comics, diagramming, mind-mapping, etc.) Writing, on the other hand, is conveying to others what I think on the page. There’s a difference.

So I was quite pleased when my friend Kio sent me this excerpt from Barbara Maria Stafford’s Visual Analogy: Consciousness As the Art of Connecting:

“Whether participating in a common outer life or making sense of the varieties of inner experience, understanding occurs as the consequence of an expenditure of psychic and physical energy compelling disparate things to converge. The inbetweenness of assemblage—those bodyobject amalgams composed of tossed scraps, found objects, organic and inorganic remnants—embodies this stunning spectrum of relocatable patterns available to human subjectivity. Collage, as the process of transforming ephemera by cutting and pasting them into momentarily stable configurations, continues to be a particularly effective technique for capturing the chimera of consciousness in action. We literally see how the brain organizes incoming visual stimuli by witnessing how perceptual organization begins by distinguishing salient features, to recombine bits and pieces and process them unequally in the mind’s eye.”

(Emphasis mine.)

29-day challenge

Friday, January 31, 2020

A few years ago, I gave up on New Year’s Resolutions. (April might be the cruelest month, but January feels like the longest.)

Now, if I make any resolutions at all, I make them in February. It’s short, therefore it brings the quickest sense of accomplishment to a new daily habit.

If you, too, would like to make a February resolution, here’s an easy, lo-fi way to keep track of your progress, adapted from the 30-day challenge in the The Steal Like An Artist Journal, and modified for the leap year:

Pick something small to do every day. Fill the boxes. Don’t break the chain!

Stealing moves

Thursday, January 30, 2020

Kobe Bryant died this week. I know next-to-nothing about basketball, but luckily when I was working on Steal Like An Artist back in 2011, my friend Matt Thomas clued me in to part of what made him such a good player:

Kobe’s interesting b/c, perhaps more than any other player, his game is based on his watching of videos of other players. Kobe’s gotten flack for this from players who learned to play “on the street” while he learned to play “watching tapes.” Kobe grew up overseas as part of the first generation where VHS tapes were ubiquitous. Tapes were his teachers.

Here’s what I wrote in chapter two of the book:

“There isn’t a move that’s a new move.” The basketball star Kobe Bryant has admitted that all of his moves on the court were stolen from watching tapes of his heroes. But initially, when Bryant stole a lot of those moves, he realized he couldn’t completely pull them off because he didn’t have the same body type as the guys he was thieving from. He had to adapt the moves to make them his own.

Kobe was far from the only player who stole moves.

Here’s Al Jefferson:

When I got to Boston I stole Paul Pierce’s ball fake. Tom Gugliotta used to kick my (butt) every day in practice my rookie year. It was always the same move – a turnaround jumper – so I stole that, (particularly) his footwork. Everyone I go against, if I like something they do, I steal it and put it in my own form.

“That’s the beauty of basketball,” said Mike Miller, in a NYTimes article about USA players importing “The Euro Step” move:

If you’re a basketball player and you want to get better, you’re going to take things from everybody. They take stuff from what we do. We take stuff from what they do.

What’s interesting is how technology continues to improve the ability of young players to study the masters who came before them.

“Where Kobe ‘stole’ Michael Jordan’s moves from watching him on VHS (e.g., “Playground” and “Come Fly with Me”), today’s young stars like Tatum ‘steal’ Kobe’s moves from YouTube,” Matt pointed out.

More from a 2018 WSJ story, “Why Are the NBA’s Best Players Getting Better Younger? YouTube”:

Tatum is young enough that he grew up with YouTube. There was never a time in his life that he couldn’t watch any clip of any NBA player any time he wanted.

“That’s how young I am,” Tatum said.

He was 7 when YouTube was invented, and it wasn’t long until he was searching for Kobe Bryant videos. “I’ve been watching Kobe ever since I can remember,” he said. But what made him the player he is today is not that Tatum simply watched Kobe. It was what he watched. And how he watched it. He studied Kobe.

Eventually, Tatum ran out of Kobe clips, and started studying other players, incorporating their swiped moves into his game.

(Another note from Matt: After his playing days were over, Kobe went into video analysis, showing others how to break down films the way he did.)

And so the game evolves. Allen Iverson, in a video about the crossover move, said:

I’m pretty sure there’s gonna be some guy who come along that’s gonna learn it and get it better than I got it and his is gonna be better than mine. Hopefully it’s my son.

Filed under: steal like an artist