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.

Sketching On The Run

Our first stop on this past weekend’s birding trip was the Big Morongo Preserve, a riparian oasis in the transition zone between the Mojave and Colorado deserts. I hadn’t adapted yet to the routine of 6 AM morning starts, but Morongo Valley is good for brightly-colored birds, and a spectacular view of a yellow-breasted chat woke me up. Richard quickly went into digiscoping mode, and other trip companions got out their telephoto lenses. I wanted to record the bird too, so I reached for my journal and sketchbook. This got me started doing a fair amount of sketching this weekend.

At the entrance to the preserve there is a set of bird feeders with many different types of food. At right is a sketch of a ladder-backed woodpecker at one of the sugar water feeders normally used by the hummingbirds.

I’m pretty happy with my sketching materials right now. All these sketches were done with a fine size Gelly Roll pen with the color added using Derwent watercolour pencils. Dabbing water on the sketch adds a bit of a wash to the color pencil, and the ink of the Gelly Roll pens is waterproof and doesn’t smear. The landscape at left is looking across the Salton Sea to mountains in the east.

A characteristic of sketching while birding is that one needs to work fast. The group is always moving on to find the next bird, leaving scarcely any time for detail in the sketch. The combination of waterproof pen and colored pencil seems about as efficient as possible for rendering line and color. One can also add color or dab in some water for a wash a little later, such as riding in the car proceeding to the next stop.

My subjects were mostly landscapes, birds, and plants. At right is leaves and fruit of Rhus trilobata, a chaparral shrub in the cashew family which we found in our journey up the Santa Rosa Mountains on the west side of the Coachella Valley.

Carrying around my journal with one hand all the time while birding gets tedious, so today I bought from a local nature gift store a nifty field guide tote that I can put my journal in, as well as a set of pencils and a pen.

Lunchtime Forays

On Friday at lunchtime I went with two of my work buddies on a sketching jaunt. We walked to the California Raptor Center. Greg drew the barred owl, Andrea concentrated on the Swainson’s hawk. I did a lot of very quick sketches of different birds. At left is the head of a turkey vulture whose name is Balzac.

It doesn’t really matter what the subject is, for me: simply putting pen or pencil to paper sort of scrubs out the inside of my head and is better than almost anything for making me feel in tune with the world.

I’m hoping we can do more of these outings on Fridays at lunch…

Paper Inconveniences

There was a lengthy Slashdot thread last Friday about metric paper sizes such as the A4 standard, it referring to a text that gives everything one might ever possibly want to know about international paper sizes.

I guess Americans aren’t much into folding things. Once one learns about the essential property of metric paper sizes—that when cut in half on the longer side of the piece of paper, one gets the next paper size down (i.e. an A4 piece of paper cut in half becomes two A5 notepad-sized sheets of paper), thanks to the longer side being the square root of two times the length of the shorter side, one starts finding the U.S. letter-sized 8 1/2×11 inch to be annoyingly inconvenient. According to the above site, this was an arbitrary choice of paper size, apparently “just a commercial compromise at the time [1921] to reduce inventory requirements without requiring significant changes to existing production equipment.”

The U.S. letter size also seems difficult to work with in terms of laying out text aesthetically on a sheet of paper. Alas A4 paper is hard to find in this country. Maybe it’s time to special-order some.

Dabbling in Illustrator

I’ve never really taken the time to learn Adobe Illustrator properly. It’s a very powerful piece of software but I’ve always managed to get things done other ways.

Yesterday, however, I was asked to do a schematic diagram of an orca with markings showing where to measure in case one washed up on the beach. Doing this in Illustrator was surprisingly easy and very satisfying. I’ve attempted a rose in the same way this evening; I’m sure you have to do this for a while to realize what your “style” is but I’m certainly up for playing a bit more!

Archeology of a Car

Inspired by Jenny and Tvindy, I made an inventory not of things that were in my fridge (nothing really interesting in there except a whole drawer full of walnut ink), but of things that were in my car. Here is a partial list from March 27, 2004. The photo at left is the little flutter book I’m in the process of making of the same subject.

A bottle of generic Ibuprofen that doesn’t expire until 2005. (This seems miraculous.)
An envelope, empty, from the Registrar of Voters in Fairfield, dated November 2003.
A press clipping on Sicilian puppeteers and Osama Bin Laden (Charlemagne’s betrayed again).
Half a ream of orange cardstock.
Denise’s green marble. It’s lain in the tray where it was since she sold me the car back in 1995.
A black umbrella I found on a train from Berkeley to Davis.
A broken #2 pencil.
A plastic bottle with SPF 40 sunblock from 1998.
A tube of Boots Lipsalve from England, long melted into oblivion.
A light that’s supposed to come on when you open the door; it just dangles from the roof instead.
A glass Venetian egg given to me by Rachel as I set out on my western quest.
The draft program for a peace ritual Karen and I held outside Mrak Hall on March 17, 2004.
Two jumper cables. They lie on the bed of the hatchback, which is where they’ve been for eight years.
A first aid kit I haven’t opened since I bought it in 1996.
Some Yolo Audubon raffle tickets from 2001.
An empty green Delorme Atlas bag.
Two inscribed art books, on Burne-Jones and George Watts, given by my great-grandfather to my great-grandmother for “her birthday, September 6, 1906.”
The Chicago Manual of Style, 13th edition, faded to pale pink in exposed patches.
A few dessicated pads: alcohol and Wash ‘n’ Dry.
A green Irish stone to put in my pocket, given to me by Gail.
An art book in German, ca. 1899. Condition poor.
Marian’s copy of Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight. I still haven’t read it.
A blue blanket with yellow stripes, the “donkey blanket.” Slept on in Spain, France, and Michigan.
A black flowered Spanish fan bought at the Corte Ingls on the Castellana. This is our only air conditioning.
A pasta spoon, white plastic with prongs.
Five assorted Spanish earthenware dishes.
A Japanese travel blessing, the string now broken, given to me by Cora, best massage therapist in Cambridge.
Exam questions for my 1981 Birmingham B.A. Combined Honours [sic] finals (French and Spanish).
My Latin linguistics exam taken in Montpellier in 1980 (in French). (I got 18/20.)
A day parking permit for UC Davis from early August 2003. Price: $6.
A receipt, type faded into illegibility.
A box of Rose Pastilles we bought in Santa Barbara in 1999.
A calligraphed “Poets Against the War” pin.
A Davis Bike Club T-shirt for the July 4th, 2001, Criterium volunteers.
A gallon ziploc bag containing traces of Skippy peanut butter.
A French orange Rhodia notebook where we write down our gas mileage.
A purple coolmax shirt from REI.
A bag of plastic styrofoam peanuts that needs to go to PDQ for re-using.
Owner’s Manual, 1986 GL Subaru 3-door.
A Giants cap with Jeff Kent’s name on it, won by Numenius in a baseball trivia contest.
A few strips of balsa-wood veneer, used as nibs in a March 2004 calligraphy workshop in San Francisco.
A pair of pink dreamcatcher earrings, given to me by Chris the day Medea Benjamin came to Davis.
A receipt from Arco, Russell Boulevard, dated March 20, 2004. Gas cost $2.19/gallon on that day.
A Bic pen that doesn’t work, and another one that does.
A brown paper bag with only one functioning handle and another one with none.
AAA maps: Davis, Woodland, Northern California. Bike map: Yolo/Solano counties.
A yellow plastic funnel and an orange plastic trowel, neither of which has ever been used.
Empty plastic bottles: Odwalla Soy Chocolate, Aquafina 16.7 oz, two nalgene water bottles.
A UC Davis L permit, good only for Lot 11, and a disabled parking permit. Both expired.
A wire coat hanger from the Santa Barbara Cleaners. I think I went there twice.
A strip of Velcro that held a trash bag, now lost, given by Auntie Kit in Cohasset for our westward trek.
A whole series of Yolo Audubon Burrowing Owl newsletters from the mid-1990s.
Two unopened bottles of brake fluid. They’ve sat through two or three stifling car-summers.
A pair of sandals I last wore while gardening at Barbara’s in April 2003.
A pair of psychedelic sunglasses I bought in Santa Barbara for the boat trip with the island scrub-jay and the red-footed booby.
Framed photos: my sister and me in 1962 (Tiburon), us with our brother in 1973 (Madrid). The frames are disintegrating.
A pair of blue shorts and a brown ponytail holder, both belonging to Numenius.
An orange plastic rain poncho, $1.99. Never been opened.
Some Windex in a blue squeezable plastic cologne bottle.
A blue cotton sheet for a twin bed.
A length of pink tulle, part of my going away present from my former job, and last worn at Code Pink.
An Aramis umbrella I found at a bus stop in Harvard Square.
Assorted socks and parts of trousers that are now officially rags. (Actually, now officially trash.)

The Grain Of Letters

One of the exciting things in our workshop this weekend was playing with the textural quality of letterforms. Nibs made out of sheets of balsa wood make very interesting and organic marks on paper. And as we discovered, the most unusual things can make for writing implements. In the last series of exercises we did, we experimented with a square of Stim-u-dent toothpicks! They made marks like a music ruling pen, only more so. The textural quality of letters for the most part gets lost using digital type, which is of course most of the letters we encounter these days.

The alphabet at right is one where I was struck by the very reed-like quality of the letterforms of the E and the F, and tried to build upon that for the rest of the letters.

Twenty Alphabets and a Cousin

Numenius and I have spent the day at the San Francisco Center for the Book, studying with Maine calligrapher Nancy Leavitt. The entire day was focusing on variations of Rudolph Koch’s Neuland typeface, a blocky, geometric alphabet we rendered in pieces of balsa veneer. It was such a treat to get covered in ink and eke texture out of these very tactile materials.

I also met my sixth cousin Stephen. He joined us after class and we went to Farley’s on Potrero Hill to exchange genealogy findings. Our common ancestor moved from Duchess County in New York following the Revolutionary War to Canada…

A Bridge Of Clay

Today we went to the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento where we saw the stoneware sculpture The Bridge by the Taiwanese artist Ah Leon. This is an amazing twenty-meter long sculpture of a wooden bridge that has fallen into disrepair. Every bit of the bridge—the wooden planks, even the nails—is made out of fired ceramics, five tons of clay in all. The details are extremely realistic, down to the finest grain of the wood, and if you didn’t know it was made out of clay, you would be easily fooled. The installation of the bridge took three days.

Also in the exhibit were a number of smaller ceramic works, including teapots with a tiny vent in the handle to allow fine control of the pouring, and simulated platters of newly made tofu in a wooden tofu press.

Photoshopped Out

I’m back from my urban foray. Photoshop is hugely complex (like we didn’t know this already) and I’m worried that if I don’t put into practice all these things I just learned, they’ll fade away.

At left is a photo of San Francisco from Judy’s house in Berkeley where I was staying (thanks Judy). This is the house Numenius grew up in, so it was sort of fun to poke about the nooks and crannies of this Arts & Crafts vertical dwelling.

New in Photoshop CS, though we don’t have the ability to do it with our cameras, is Raw editing; lens blur and average filters have uses that aren’t altogether obvious, and the file browser is much slicker. I won’t be upgrading just yet—there are other priorities.

It’s amazing to be around 2,500 people who are as excited about all this as I am; there were obvious cliques of Designers versus Photographers, but everyone got along. Watching our teachers duke it out in the afternoon today during Photoshop Wars was quite entertaining.