When I sit down with my diary, the most important thing is to not spend much time staring at a blank page. Today I made a comic grid and started copying lines from William Blake’s “Proverbs of Hell,” from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. (Seemed appropriate, with the solstice and all…)
Drawing the moon
Here are Galileo’s drawings of the moon, made over 400 years ago. And here are my comparatively pathetic doodles of the moon phases, copied from online diagrams yesterday in my diary to try to memorize them:
Why bother copying a diagram of the moon? Because copying is how we learn, of course, and in the course of learning how to learn again, I’ve discovered that if you want to understand something, you need to draw it out, with your own pencil and paper, to force yourself to really look at what you’re copying and internalize it.
Even better if you can start sneaking what you’re learning into your work:
Filed under: the moon
This is just to say
I love copying my kids’ drawings and writings into my diary. Copying seems like a mindless activity when you first start out, but by the time you’ve finished your copy, you usually learn something about the thing you’re copying and/or you discover something of your own.
The first grader wrote this poem last night at the pizza joint. (He and his brother have been watching the poetry episode of Classical Baby and reciting WCW’s “This is Just to Say.”)
While I copied the poem, I noticed how he writes his lowercase a’s and how he forms the letters starting from the bottom. I thought about Emily Dickinson’s envelope poems and about how the size of the paper we write on affects what we write. I thought about how quickly kids move towards parody with their own work, and how here I was, again, making a copy of a copy.
When I copied the tablecloth, I noticed that the original pattern could become a skull or some kind of death mask.
When I copied the exploding earth, I wondered what was with the teeth, until I realized they were exploded parts of the poles.
Copying is a way of paying closer attention.
Side note: I find it interesting how whenever I post something “dark” that my kids make, strangers assume that they’re “dark” kids. They’re actually quite cheerful kids… it’s called “imagination,” man!
A copy of a copy
Yesterday the 4-year-old brought his book of Coco sheet music into the studio and I copied a statue of Ernesto de la Cruz for him to color.
Today he came in and wanted to copy my copy. He had trouble starting, so I drew Ernesto’s head and torso, and he finished up his legs, arms, and guitar. I like our copy of the copy even more:
This happens a lot when I’m drawing solo: I’ll attempt a drawing of something from life, and then if I copy that drawing, simplifying the lines, I get something more reduced and interesting.
Now I’m wondering what a third step would look like. A copy of a copy of a copy…
Related: Copying is how we learn.
Melville and Basquiat
It’s Melville’s 200th birthday, so here’s one of my favorite things: the table of contents for Moby-Dick, copied out by Jean-Michel Basquiat onto 9 sheets of paper. Here’s a close-up:
He also incorporated some of the table of contents into this (untitled) piece:
Closer up:
(All of these images come from a teacher’s packet put out by the Brooklyn Museum.)
The Scream (tracing an obsession)
My kids have obsessions. Deep, drawn-out obsessions. And sometimes, as with my 5-year-old and Kraftwerk, we get so far into the obsession that I can’t even remember when or how the obsession began.
Our 3-year-old’s latest obsession is drawing Edvard Munch’s The Scream. WTF?
It all began when he was inspecting Welcome to Mamoko and came across this picture of an art thief. (Oh, the irony of life.) he zoomed in and pointed it out to my wife. “Painting!”
So, my wife printed out a photo of the painting from the internet, and he immediately began copying it. (Copying is how we learn.) The above picture was drawn on June 15th.
Here’s a drawing from July 7th — four weeks later! He was still drawing the scream.
The next day, we took him to the Blanton Museum, thinking maybe we’d see some weird expressionist painting that would be a good substitute. No such luck.
But then we were walking past the window of the gift shop and he stops and shouts, “Mama!” What does he point to? A frickin’ finger puppet of The Scream. In a huge pile of other finger puppets!
So the obsession continues. Who knows how long it will last?
Yesterday, I was lettering the cover for my next book, over and over again. I tried to channel Jules drawing The Scream.
I kept thinking about how much of my work is just being obsessed. Giving myself over to things that interest me, not just for a few days or a few weeks, but for months and for years.
It’s thrilling to watch my kids have the time and space for their obsessions. To see where they go. They keep teaching me how to learn.
Copying is how we learn
“You start when you’re young and you copy. You straight up copy.”
—Shel Silverstein
All artists begin by copying. (I wrote a book about it.) But what’s instructive about hanging out with kids all day is understanding on a day-to-day kid’s eye level just how natural copying comes to us.
My kids (5 & 2) are gleeful, natural born copycats. Copying is how they wrap their hands and hearts and heads around the world. They not only copy drawings and music and recreate the world with blocks and play, they mimic their parents, they mimic each other, they mimic kids on the playground, etc. Copying and mimicry is as natural to them as breathing. There’s nobody around telling them they should do any differently, nobody saying something dumb like, “Don’t you want to do something original?” So they go about their mimicry, unfettered by any adult notions about originality.
When my son got into engines last year, he spent endless hours copying diagrams out of car repair manuals.
Soon, he was into drawing musical instruments:
And at that point, since he’d landed on one of my own passions, I decided to start copying him. I would copy his drawings into my notebook, trying to steal some of his line style:
Then he started copying sheet music, just for kicks:
I’ve decided to copy that from him, too, and start copying piano pieces I want to learn by hand. There’s a beautiful story told by Paul Elie in Reinventing Bach:
Johann Christoph [Bach’s older brother] kept a collection of sheet music locked in a cabinet with latticed wood doors. Bach, perhaps now twelve, yearned to make music, not run through the exercises his brother assigned him, which he had already mastered. One night while the others were asleep he slipped a hand through the latticework, took hold of a sheet of music with thumb and forefinger, drew it out through the slats, and copied the notation onto a fresh sheet. Working by moonlight, he copied the manuscript the next night, and the next, until the moon entered a new phase. After six months of moonlit nights he had a complete work. Finally one morning he brought the fresh piece of sheet music to the clavier and played it….
Bach himself liked to tell that story, and his point was that this is how he educated himself and learned how to make music—by deeply studying the work of other composers. One of the best ways to internalize someone’s work is to copy it by hand.
Here’s Nicholson Baker, with his advice to writers:
Copy out things that you really love. Any book. Put the quotation marks around it, put the date that you’re doing the copying out, and then copy it out. You’ll find that you just soak into that prose, and you’ll find that the comma means something, that it’s there for a reason, and that that adjective is there for a reason, because the copying out, the handwriting, the becoming an apprentice—or in a way, a servant—to that passage in the book makes you see things in it that you wouldn’t see if you just moved your eyes over it, or even if you typed it. If your verbal mind isn’t working, then stop trying to make it work by pushing, and instead, open that spiral notebook, find a book that you like, and copy out a couple paragraphs.
After our last presidential election, the artist Morgan O’Hara went to the reading room at the New York Public Library with “with a small suitcase of pens, a few Sharpies, papers and copies of the Constitution. I brought old notebooks, half-used drawing pads and loose sheets to share with anyone who might show up.” Then she started copying the Constitution by hand, with other people who showed up joining along. She wrote of the experience:
Hand copying a document can produce an intimate connection to the text and its meaning. The handwriter may discover things about this document that they never knew, a passage that challenges or moves them. They may even leave with a deeper connection to the founders and the country, or even a sense of encouragement.
The cartoonist Lynda Barry writes beautifully about the magic of copying writing and drawings by hand. Here’s a page from Everything, Volume 1:
She says:
I think copying someone’s work is the fastest way to learn certain things about drawing and line. It’s funny how there is such a taboo against it. I learned everything from just copying other people’s work.
She brings the practice into her classrooms, and every few weeks, has her students get up and look at the notebooks of other students. “They are encouraged to try out anything they see. To copy all they want. To draw in a way they would have never thought of on their own.”
When I was in middle school, my English teacher, Mrs. Neff, had us keep composition books, and sometimes she gave us a prompt to answer, but sometimes she simply wrote a poem on the board for us to copy. She never made it explicit exactly what we were supposed to be learning by copying, but now I know. We were absorbing the poem. (I still do this regularly in my notebook.)
Eventually you can’t help but move from copying into something of your own. My 5-year-old is already figuring this out: A few months ago he started recreating Kraftwerk songs in Garageband, but his versions always had something new and interesting in them. It was his inability to perfectly replicate the song that made something interesting happen.
This process was brilliantly summarized by @neinquarterly on Twitter:
RE-IMAGINING FROM MEMORY
All memory has to be reimagined. For we have in our memories micro-films that can only be read if they are lighted by the bright light of the imagination.
— Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics Of Space
Something weird happens when we try to recreate cultural artifacts from memory: the result has less to do with the artifact, and more to do with us.
A year or two ago I got a Bonnie Raitt song stuck in my head. “I Can’t Make You Love Me.” I had the day off and I was bored, so I decided to sit down with my guitar and try to record the song from memory. I didn’t want to bother learning the lyrics or listen to the original. I just wanted to roll tape and see what happened.
On playback, it was the same song, but it wasn’t. The chords were “off,” and I’m pretty sure I left out a bridge. It’s like the filter of my memory took out the musical complexity and stripped it down to its bones. Left only a “cartoon” of the song…
Here’s the story behind the amazing Dirty Projectors album, Rise Above:
[Dirty Projectors man man Dave] Longstreth went to help his parents move out of the house he grew up in. Among his youthful artifacts was the cassette case from the Black Flag album Damaged. This brought back all sorts of memories— Black Flag was one of Longstreth’s first loves— but the tape itself was missing. So, like the character in the Jorge Luis Borges story ‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote’ who sets out to recreate Don Quixote line by line from memory, Longstreth went to the nearest Guitar Center, purchased the cheapest cassette four-track he could find, and embarked on recasting Damaged from memory, without re-listening to a single note or reading any lyrics. The ten songs that make up Rise Above (titled after one of the tracks on Damaged) stem from these four-track demos, recorded at his parents’ house on an acoustic guitar.
“I had to completely inhabit my early adolescence, the time when I used to listen to Damaged,” Longstreth has said. “[I was] trying to access the memory crystals stored from when I loved it back in middle school.”
The beauty of Rise Above is that Longstreth used his memory of the original Black Flag songs as a starting point to create “new” songs. “I wanted to see if I could make this album…not as an album of covers or an homage per se, but as an original creative act.” It was his imagination that made them great.
It frees us to have constraints. I’m starting to believe that the idea that the artist can should sit down and create something “new” is a paralyzing delusion. We can only create a collage of our influences, our memories—filtered through our imagination.
By re-interpreting these artifacts, we come up with something that is uniquely our own.
Ivan Brunetti has a drawing exercise (link long dead — try his excellent book, Cartooning: Philosophy and Practice) where he has his students doodle cartoon characters quickly, from memory:
When drawing characters quickly, from memory, one can be quite inaccurate, almost as if one is inventing new characters, and these “mistakes” can serve as the basis for new character designs. This lets the students see their own styles more clearly. A page full of these doodles can help the student discern certain qualities that are consistent within their set of drawings. These qualities are a clue as to what makes one’s particular “visual handwriting” different or unique, and these should be embraced by the student.
The idea that by drawing from memory “copies” of other work, we can somehow sharpen our own sense of what makes us unique! I love it.
Links:
COPYING
“I think copying someone’s work is the fastest way to learn certain things about drawing and line. It’s funny how there is such a taboo against it. I learned everything from just copying other people’s work.”
– Lynda Barry
This is my copy of some of the panels from a 1930s Gasoline Alley strip that Frank King drew in the style of a woodcut. I superimposed my own characters. Supposedly, Chris Ware loved this particular strip so much that he tore the page out of the Smithsonian Collection Of Newspaper Comics book and had it mounted on the wall of his studio.
Mine’s a library copy, so I can’t go that far.
TRACING GIANTS WITH MY FINGER
You never know what you’ll find in Mac’s Backs. Here’s a brand-new lit journal to check out: A PUBLIC SPACE. Stories by Peter Orner and Kelly Link, a comic by Kevin Huizenga, and an interview with Haruki Murakami, in which he talks about translating Carver:
When I read Carver’s stories, I was stunned…You know, in the old days, people would trace the writing in good books. Japanese people used to trace the pages of The Tale of Genji, for example. You can learn so many things from tracing. It’s just like putting your feet into other people’s shoes. Translation is the same thing.
Rad stuff. Really looking forward to Peter Orner’s new book, and re-reading his last one.
And wow: The Gospel of Judas. Can’t you just hear Tuco saying, “Judas! You sold my hide!”