22 September 26
Slinking Towards Nature Journaling
I have not been very consistent about nature journaling, unlike my daily sketching habit and writing my daily regular journal. After watching some of the Wild Wonder conference last week I’d like to be doing more of it but need to figure out what barriers have been getting in my way. One of this is the sentiment I have to be out in the wilds to do nature journaling, though this is of course not the case. Another is that I’ve been exposed to two major exemplars for nature journaling, neither of which is going to work for me. The first is the Grinnell Method for writing field notes, which I was exposed to as a zoology student 44 years ago. This is very rigorous and scientific but not a great deal of fun. The second is seeing the journals of professional scientific illustrators, which intimidate me in with the quality of their field sketches. What if I instead think of the journal as a record of nature as it comes along in my daily path? Backyard garden notes are good to do here.
This page is from a nature journaling outing I did yesterday to the local arboretum. This isn’t precisely my backyard, but it’s only eight blocks.
21 September 26
Snapshot of a Life: A Map
As I wrote in my post on Saturday, one of the many things I had scheduled was a Your Life Mapmaking Class with Brendan Lorber, a birthday present from my sister. Way more fun than it had any right to be. (Mudpies are how I describe my creative process, see this villanelle I wrote over 20 years ago…)
20 September 26
Alley Without A Name
Yesterday was the monthly Let’s Draw Davis sketchcrawl. We met downtown at a landmark red English phone booth and then dispersed to do our sketching. Several of us went to the alley between D and E streets which as our organizer Pete Scully pointed out doesn’t seem to have a name. This alley is right behind the Pence Gallery and there is much of visual interest there, both to sketch and to photograph.
19 September 26
Overscheduled
In addition to the Wild Wonder Conference full schedule today, culminating in a talk tonight between Amy Tan and Ed Yong, the following things are on my calendar. (Thank goodness the WW conference is being recorded so I can go back and watch the sessions later.)
1) 8:00 am Pacific Sunrise Studios, a weekly gathering of comics folks to work on their own projects. May pop in.
2) 10:00 am Comix Coven, a year-long workshop I’ve paid for and will attend, especially since it’s kind of a follow-up to the Watercolor for Haters session we did last Saturday.
3) 10:30 Davis Urban Sketchcrawl — the only in-person thing I have on today but can’t go, sadly, because of 2).
4) 11:45 Pencil Miles and Chill at WW — not likely to attend, but I’ve already missed a couple of these and it really is worth showing up for live.
5) 1:00 Value and Color at WW — not likely to attend, definitely want to catch this one after the fact.
6) 2:45 Argh! It Moved! Sketching Live Animals (WW). Can’t do this one live because of 7).
7) 3:00 Mapmaking Class which was a birthday present and I must attend or face the opprobrium of my sister. (I’m actually pretty excited about it but the timing sucks.)
8) 7:00 Conversation between Ed Yong and Amy Tan. Not missing for anything.
I haven’t had this much scheduled time in ages, and it’s worse that it’s on zoom. I’m going to go for a walk to clear my head before this all gets underway.
18 September 26
Material Knowledge
Maria Coryell-Martin in her workshop on ink and watercolor for the Wild Wonder Conference cited a favorite quote from the photographer David Bayles from his book Art and Fear: “vision is always ahead of execution, knowledge of materials is your contact with reality, and uncertainty is a virtue”. The concept of knowledge of materials is something that makes instant sense to those who work in watercolor. To take but one example, by playing with paints one learns that ultramarine and burnt sienna mix in the right proportion to a lovely steel gray. Thinking much more broadly than just art, knowledge of material properties of the world is both incredibly important and extremely undervalued epistemologically.
When we visited Spain, we had to negotiate several different transit systems. Now every transit system in the world has their interfaces to try to ensure that only people who have paid are making use of the system. Sometimes these involve a human (the bus driver looks to see if you’ve put the right coins in the box), sometimes these are automated, for instance involving card readers. Especially with automated systems, first-time users can have considerable trouble getting the card to register. People who ride on the transit systems every day know exactly what to do, where to place the card on the reader. This difficulty befell us several times particularly when accessing the Renfe trains.
This is to point out that locals have material knowledge of their environment that tourists simply do not possess. Moreover, this knowledge is not something that can be written down — rather, one learns exactly where to place the transit card on the card reader either by experiment or by watching or asking other people.
I feel that in this line of thinking there is a kernel of a strong critique against the belief by the all-too-powerful tech cultists that we are about to build systems with artificial general intelligence (AGI). Today’s extremely large-scale and expensive AI systems are trained on trillions of pieces of text often together with associated images. But our understanding of the world goes far beyond what is written down in digitized text. Knowledge of materials is our contact with reality. Knowing when the bread dough has too much water in it is something that is learned through touch, not reading about it.To the extent that we have a national science policy anymore it involves investing heavily in AI research and development. This is something of a bank shot in terms of scientific progress — the increases in pattern detection and reasoning capabilities that come from improved AI can be applied to other domains of science. But this logic ignores the fact that scientific advances ultimately bottom out in the work of people who are highly skilled in manipulating material aspects of reality. Science does not develop through on reasoning power alone. Every advance in biomedical sciences has come about in part through the labor of technicians who are extremely good at bench lab work, for instance being careful enough to keep the vials for polymerase chain reaction experiments clean from stray fragments of DNA that end up on laboratory surfaces.
I have written a bit about materiality and AI before on this blog but there is much to explore here. I’d like to learn what the 4E (a shorthand for ‘embodied, embedded, extended, and enactive’) cognition folks are saying about AI now, and could start with a journal special issue entitled Minds in movement: embodied cognition in the age of artificial intelligence that came out a couple years ago.17 September 26
More Sketching During Webinars
The Wild Wonder Conference continues. Here are two sessions I attended today.
Austin Kleon gave the keynote address this evening… I’m going to be thinking about what he said for a long time.
16 September 26
Contour Carrots
Yesterday I joined Pica in watching Maria Coryell-Martin’s class on ink and watercolor for the Wild Wonder Conference. Maria’s philosophy is that ink gives the bones to a sketch, and watercolor brings it to life. One of the techniques she presented was beginning with a contour sketch of the subject in waterproof ink followed by adding watercolor. I tried this today with three carrots.
15 September 26
Wild Wondering
I’ve attended four zoom presentations today at the Wild Wonder Conference, all of them excellent, but I’m exhausted now. This one was the first, when I was still fresh at 8:30 this morning.
All goats are obnoxious even when they’re pretending to be friendly…
ETA: It was five, not four, zoom presentations, though I snuck out for a coffee during one of them.
13 September 26
Learning to Love Cauliflouring in Watercolor
As I mentioned, I had a workshop yesterday about losing our fear of watercolor. We were encouraged to take five colors to make one or more palettes, seen in the first photo. We made different saturations of the same color. Then we lettered with a round brush, and experimented with adding outlines with ink or brush.
It was a great experiment and I will be doing more playing in the Stillman and Birn Zeta sketchbook that arrived in the mail today.
Watercolor purists spend a lot of time and energy trying to avoid the effect known as cauliflouring: mostly this happens because impatient painters apply wet paint to almost-dry paint. I’m trying to learn to work with the effect, since patience isn’t a strong suit of mine.
12 September 26
Freeform Radio Sketch
I went over to campus this morning to do my urban sketch for the day and found myself sitting across from the entrance to the KDVS studio in Freeborn Hall. KDVS is the college radio station here, broadcasting at a power of 13,000 watts from an 194’ tall antenna located near the Yolo County Landfill northeast of Davis. Their tagline is “Freeform Community Radio”, which is par for the course for a college radio station.