To Learn, and Learn, and Learn

Coup de Vent at London and the North has just written about our feelings of loss as the little comfortable corner of the blogosphere we’ve settled into shifts, much as a kitten on a sunny nook of tile floor discovers that the source of heat has moved on.

I’ve been pondering this all day. Yesterday we bought a copy of Peter Steinhart’s The Undressed Art: Why We Draw (Knopf, 2004). Although I’m not very far along in this, the startling truth is that life drawing classes are chock-a-block full of people who show up with compulsive regularity, not to produce ART, but simply to get better. Maybe one day.

As Steinhart relates of Hokusai, at the age of seventy-three: “From the age of six I had a mania for drawing the form of things. By the time I was fifty, I had published an infinity of designs, but all that I have produced before the age of seventy is not worth taking into account. At seventy-three I have learned a little about the real structure of nature, of animals, plants, birds, fishes and insects. In consequence, when I am eighty, I shall have made more progress, at ninety I shall penetrate the mystery of things, at a hundred I shall have reached a marvelous stage, and when I am a hundred and ten, everything I do, be it a dot or a line, will be alive.”

While this kind of timetable can become a little depressing, it also argues, I think, for showing up every day and TRYING. I think this can extend to the blog as well as drawing. While there are probably as many reasons for blogging as there are blogs, I wonder whether some of us aren’t tempted by the lure of the immediate success, the instant masterpiece; this is what our culture (Western, Butuki, but I’m not sure Japan is immune) is pushing us towards.

I hope, one day, to do a drawing that’s a little bit good. I hope also, one day, to write a piece, here or elsewhere, that’s a little bit good. Until then, I’m grateful to people who read here and either refrain from pointing out my shortcomings or are actually positively encouraging. I am so grateful, basically, for this community.

Incidentally, Michael Moore feels a bit more urgency than some of us might, and so I’m also grateful he has put Fahrenheit 9/11 out there for all of us. Not just the choir he was palpably preaching to in the theatre we saw it in yesterday; all of us. See it if you get the chance.