From a writeup of a talk by John Muir Laws on nature journaling:
For each thing you record, note these three things:
Awareness: “I see…”: You notice something, draw a picture of it, make notes about it
Creativity: “It reminds me of…” (or more simply “IRMO”): You consciously seek out analogies to what you’ve seen and make notes about those
Curiosity: “I wonder…”: You ask questions or create hypotheses about what you’ve seen.
In Keep Going, I have a chapter called, “Forget the noun, do the verb,” and after seeing it on the poster, a reader asked if it was inspired by Stephen Fry. I had no idea what she was talking about, so I did a little googling.
In 2010, Fry was interviewed by “14-year-old Eden Parris in an interview for a Radio Times feature that enabled young readers to meet their TV heroes.” During the course of the interview, he “warned Parris that language could shape and limit people’s ambitions”:
Oscar Wilde said that if you know what you want to be, then you inevitably become it – that is your punishment, but if you never know, then you can be anything. There is a truth to that. We are not nouns, we are verbs. I am not a thing – an actor, a writer – I am a person who does things – I write, I act – and I never know what I am going to do next. I think you can be imprisoned if you think of yourself as a noun.
Of course, this would’ve been perfect for the book, but that is one of the universal laws of writing books: once you finish them, you find all the stuff you should’ve included but left out based on your ignorance.
The quote I did put in is from R. Buckminster Fuller’s classic, I Seem To Be A Verb:
Back in 2013, The New Statesman ran a piece called “What Atheists Can Learn from Believers,” in which the writer Karen Armstrong emphasized religion as a verb. “Usually religion is about doing things and it is hard work.” She pointed out that in the modern west, there’s this idea that you have to believe first, and then do. But no, “we have turned faith into a head-trip,” when, originally, the English word “belief” meant something like, “commitment.”
“Credo ut intellegam – I commit myself in order that I may understand,” said Saint Anselm (1033-1109). In the late 17th century, the English word “belief” changed its meaning and became the intellectual acceptance of a somewhat dubious proposition. Religious people now think that they have to “believe” a set of incomprehensible doctrines before embarking on a religious way of life. This makes no sense. On the contrary, faith demands a disciplined and practical transcendence of egotism, a “stepping outside” the self which brings intimations of transcendent meaning that makes sense of our flawed and tragic world.
It’s remarkable to me how much you could apply what Armstrong is saying to creativity or making art. “If you don’t do religion, you don’t get it,” Armstrong says. Religion is something we do, a “practical discipline in which we learn new capacities of mind and heart.”
“It’s a practice,” Mary Karr says of her own faith. “It’s not something you believe. It’s not doctrine. Doctrine has nothing to do with it. It’s a set of actions.” I remember once, when asked to make a case for religion, she replied, “Why don’t you just pray for 30 days and see if your life gets better?
So many people think you have to first call yourself an artist, know who you are and what you’re about, and then you can start making art. No, no, no. You do the stuff first, then you can worry about what it is, who you are. The important thing is the practice. The doing. The verb.
We aren’t nouns, we are verbs. Forget the nouns, do the verbs.
When I toured the Corita Art Center last weekend, I kept seeing evidence of Corita Kent’s thoughts on the seasons (I wrote about them in Keep Going):
I’d noticed Thoreau quotes in Corita’s work before. She seemed to especially like these lines from Walden: “If a man does not keep pace with his companions perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.” She used the quote in at least two different pieces over the years:
So I asked (former) director Ray Smith if she knew of any explicit imagery with Thoreau. She led me straight to a drawer with The Stamp of Thoreau piece (from Corita’s series, A Set Of Heroes And Sheroes) that you see above.
This was one of those great moments when I realized there was actually an unmade connection between two artists in my creative family tree:
That was then filled by another artist I love:
Everything is connected, but the connections only matter if you make them!
Jon Klassen (author of the fantastic Hat trilogy) shares this quote with people who ask him how to get kids writing and drawing more.
He explained in a tweet thread:
i take “the dictation of the materials” to mean that there are things that certain forms or tools “like” to do more than other things. certain kinds of mediums make for certain kinds of drawings, a picture book format makes for certain kinds of stories (loosely speaking).
being able to analyze what the materials WANT to do is such a huge part making anything & seems like rather than getting kids to specifically write something or draw something, getting them to think about that is way more broadly useful.
because you end up applying it yourself. you are a material with strengths and weaknesses. being able to look at what you’re working with objectively and decide what to make based on that is such a huge part of this job, at least it has been for me.
(relating to getting kids writing/drawing, materials give parameters. like giving them only a black marker means they might start thinking about drawings that only need that – what picture does that marker WANT to make? now they are solving a problem instead of “draw something!”)
(where that applies to writing, for me, was the absence of narration. i don’t know what to do with it, so i’m left with dialogue. what do stories with visuals and only dialogue WANT to do? they want to be about lying a lot, apparently.)
I’ve written a lot more about Albers and her idea of materials dictating the work in my previous post, “Materials, man.” (For more on materials and kids making stuff, check out “On Chuck Jones, Parenting, and Art Supplies.”)
This excerpt from Aaron Rose’s documentary Become A Microscope shows Corita Kent with her students, using what she called “finders” to learn how to see with fresh eyes. “You have to look at the world [in] small pieces at a time,” she said. “Look at it. Just a small part of the world.”
The Finders are described in the wonderful book based on her teachings, Learning By Heart:
[The finder] is a device, which does the same things as the camera lens or viewfinder. It helps us take things out of context, allows us to see for the sake of seeing, and enhances our quick-looking and decision-making skills.
An instant finder is an empty 35mm slide holder. Or you can make your own by cutting a rectangular hole out of a heavy piece of paper or cardboard—heavy enough so that it won’t bend with constant use. You can then view life without being distracted by content. You can make visual decisions—in fact, they are made for you.
When I visited the Corita Art Center yesterday, I was delighted to find out that they use Finders as their business cards:
1. Our neighborhood was filled with monarch butterflies last week. “More monarchs are expected to fly through Austin than have in 10 years,” says a report from KUT. “Thanks to exceptionally good weather up north, where monarchs lay their eggs during the summer.”
Monarch butterflies are making their way through Texas to wintering spots in Mexico…. Think of Austin as a rest stop for migrating monarchs. Just as you need to fill up your tank when you drive down I-35, monarchs need to stop to eat. In the fall, they fill up on the nectar of certain flowers; in the spring, it’s milkweed they need to lay their eggs on. Austin adopted policies to grow milkweed in the spring and summer and encourage the growth of native pollinator plants.
2. Flying from Austin to Los Angeles this week, I watched Won’t You Be My Neighbor? At the beginning of the documentary, Fred Rogers is shown sitting at a piano and talking about modulation — a fancy word for changing keys. He shows how some key changes are more difficult than others — C major to F major is pretty easy, for example, but F major to F# major not so much. He felt that his job was to help children through the modulations of their lives.
3. Migrations and modulations. Movement and change. “Maybe I’m trying to combine things that can’t be combined,” Fred Rogers says to the camera. “But it makes sense to me.”
I saw these images walking around Pasadena this morning, the day after the Day of the Dead. Later, back in my hotel room, I found out that Nick Cave has started The Red Hand Files, a site where he answers questions from fans. He’s written about boredom and Grinderman (two of my favorite things), and, in a truly lovely letter, his thoughts on grief after losing his son:
I feel the presence of my son, all around, but he may not be there. I hear him talk to me, parent me, guide me, though he may not be there. He visits Susie in her sleep regularly, speaks to her, comforts her, but he may not be there. Dread grief trails bright phantoms in its wake. These spirits are ideas, essentially. They are our stunned imaginations reawakening after the calamity. Like ideas, these spirits speak of possibility. Follow your ideas, because on the other side of the idea is change and growth and redemption. Create your spirits. Call to them. Will them alive. Speak to them. It is their impossible and ghostly hands that draw us back to the world from which we were jettisoned; better now and unimaginably changed.
Read the whole letter here.
A few days ago I was reading an article about journaling as self-care, and came across several quotes by local Austin professor James Pennebaker, author of The Secret Life of Pronouns and Opening Up By Writing It Down. Pennebaker had this to say about when and how and how long to journal therapeutically:
Dr. Pennebaker’s research has found that even a one-time 15-to-30-minute session of focused journal writing can be beneficial. In fact, he said he is not “a big fan of journaling every day.”
“One of the interesting problems of writing too much, especially if you’re going through a difficult a time, is that writing becomes more like rumination and that’s the last thing in the world you need,” he said. “My recommendation is to think of expressive writing as a life course correction. As opposed to something you have commit to doing every day for the rest of your life.”
If you’re distressed about something, Dr. Pennebaker advises, set aside three to four days to write for 15 to 20 minutes a day about it. If you don’t find a benefit from it, he says, “stop doing it. Go jogging. See a therapist. Go to a bar. Go to church.”
I drew these notes during a Pennebaker lecture back in 2011. Fascinating guy.
The six-year-old is taking art classes at Laguna Gloria. I love dropping him off because while he’s in class, the 3-year-old and I get to explore the grounds. (An older dad told me years ago how important it is to split your kids up once in a while and go on little one-on-one “dates” together.) Yesterday the 3-year-old was having some serious separation anxiety (my wife is out of town), so I put some paper down on the stone ledge around the tiny koi pond and told him to draw the plants. This is what he drew.
