New Book—Old Dog (361)

Well, four days in and I’ve already missed one. I contemplated doing two pieces today, and I still might, but not to replace the missing day. I guess that all of the yard work that I did yesterday might be considered a type of green sculpture, or performance art. At the end of the day, the art that I created stayed in my head. I’m ok with that.

Today we went to Annapolis to get my daughter a new cell phone. She was coming from Baltimore, so we had a little time to wait at the store. I decided to go into a nearby Barnes and Noble to browse the art books. I was looking for a painting technique book and found one. After thumbing through, I realized that it would be like many of the textbooks I’ve paid lots of bucks for in the past—It would end up unopened on the bookshelf. I went to replace it on the shelf and came across Milton Glaser’s Drawing is Thinking.

Milton is my hero and I was familiar with this book. I gave in to the impulse and swiped my plastic. This book has about 23 pages of printing and 200 pages of images. The premise is that you look at his images sequentially to get into his mind and his way of thinking. Brilliant! In the interview, which makes up the body of the text, Glaser makes the following comment:
“Intelligence needs to be developed. The brain succeeds by repetition. If you do the right thing over and over, the brain gets stronger. If you do the wrong thing over and over, the brain gets weaker.”

I consider the repetition of doing design where the “committee customer” has so much control and input that they remove the elements that I put in that make the design work. The result is vanilla poop. I do this so often that I have lost faith and confidence in my capabilities. I remember as a young artist, I had a great sense of self-confidence and approached my artwork with surety.

My recent efforts have been more guarded, more controlled. I worry that I have lost my skills with my confidence. My recent efforts with a rediscovered school-mate have renewed my sense of potential. So I sat down with a 9B pencil and sketch pad and returned to a subject I know and love. My old beagle Sadie lay down next to me, as she often does, while I brought out my drawing gear. So here she is. Perhaps she will appear a few more times. Drawing is thinking indeed.

As I begin to do the right thing, I hope my brain and my confidence in my art will become stronger. Milton’s book is amazing in the fact that there is a new story each time I “read” it—picture books are great.