Picasso, I'm not
Drawing is hard. It's really difficult to improve, no matter how often you do it. You can recognize the good in other people's work and you can recognize the bad in your own work, but somehow it's slow goin' to reconcile the two of them.
Tonight at art class, time slipped away. We played with paints and drew with waxy, dry crayons and china markers. We chose the theme upon which we'll create a body of work. My theme is trash. I chose it because I am fascinated by how much trash we humans produce. I'm always finding amazing things in the trash or wanting to create something with my own trash. I define trash as anything unwanted or discarded, but when my classmates brainstormed the topic, they came up with these words: recycle, remove, return, trailer, Camel lights, ashtrays, trash = golden (some of it), one person’s trash is another’s treasure, city litter, dumpster diving, making new things out of trash, Wednesday evening, interesting broken objects.
In order to improve my skills while I'm taking this class, I started re-reading Betty Edwards' book Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. I've used this book before in the past and it's helped motivate and teach me, when I put some time into it. I was reading this quote and it made me sad, because a few weeks ago I talked to my brother who's going blind. He's 38 and he’s been sighted his whole life, but he recently had to order one of those white blind canes. (Am I a horrible person because my Halloween costume this year incorporates such a cane?) Anyway, this quote seemed to have some impact, so I thought I'd share it.
Tonight at art class, time slipped away. We played with paints and drew with waxy, dry crayons and china markers. We chose the theme upon which we'll create a body of work. My theme is trash. I chose it because I am fascinated by how much trash we humans produce. I'm always finding amazing things in the trash or wanting to create something with my own trash. I define trash as anything unwanted or discarded, but when my classmates brainstormed the topic, they came up with these words: recycle, remove, return, trailer, Camel lights, ashtrays, trash = golden (some of it), one person’s trash is another’s treasure, city litter, dumpster diving, making new things out of trash, Wednesday evening, interesting broken objects.
In order to improve my skills while I'm taking this class, I started re-reading Betty Edwards' book Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. I've used this book before in the past and it's helped motivate and teach me, when I put some time into it. I was reading this quote and it made me sad, because a few weeks ago I talked to my brother who's going blind. He's 38 and he’s been sighted his whole life, but he recently had to order one of those white blind canes. (Am I a horrible person because my Halloween costume this year incorporates such a cane?) Anyway, this quote seemed to have some impact, so I thought I'd share it.
"Few people realize what an astonishing achievement it is to be able to see at all. The main contribution of the new field of artificial intelligence has been not so much to solve these problems of information handling as much to show what tremendously difficult problems they are. When one reflects on the number of computations that must have to be carried out before one can recognize even such an everyday scene as another person crossing the street, one is left with a feeling of amazement that such an extraordinary series of detailed operations can be accomplished so effortlessly in such a short space of time."
-F.H.C. Crick, "Thinking about the Brain" in The Brain, San Francisco: A
Scientific American Book, 1979
posted by Freewendy @ 10:31 PM
1 Comments:
At 4:45 PM,
Anonymous said…
Richard Feyman describes what a miracle vision is:
"If I'm sitting next to a swimming pool, and somebody dives in - and she's not too pretty, so I can think of something else - I think of the waves and things that have formed in the water. And, when lots of people have dived in the pool there's a very great choppiness of all these waves all over the water and to think that it's possible, maybe, that in those waves there's a clue as to what's happening in the pool. That some sort of insect or something with sufficient cleverness could sit in the corner of the pool and just be disturbed by the waves, and by the nature of the irregularities and bumping of the waves have figured out who jumped in where and when and where what's happening all over the pool.
"And that's what we're doing when we're looking at something. The light that comes out is waves, just like in the swimming pool except in three dimensions instead of the two dimensions of the pool. And we have a eighth of an inch black hole into which these things go, which is particularly sensitive to the parts of the waves that are coming in a particular direction it's not particularly sensitive when they're coming in at the wrong angle which we say is from the corner of our eye. And if we want to get more information from the corner of our eye we swivel this ball about so that the hole moves from place to place. It's quite wonderful that we can see and figure out so easily."
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