Category: Creative concepts

So I’ve mentioned here before that Jack, my boy, 9, good, handsome, smart, got into his skull that he just had to become a rock ‘n’ roll drummer and, despite my attempts to dissuade him, has been taking lessons and hammering away on most horizontal surfaces with his drum sticks whenever possible.
A couple of weeks ago, however, his pal, Lucas, decided that he no longer wanted to take guitar lessons, though his twin, Edith, has been excelling on said instrument and, in fact, last Friday, played “I’m a Believer” to a sold out crowd in the PS41 talent show, and a good time was had by all, except perhaps for Lucas. Anyway, around the same time that Lucas gave up on the guitar, Jack started fooling around on that same guitar, and mentioned casually to me, that maybe playing the guitar was cool and that maybe he’d like to play it someday. My ears pricked up and I suggested that maybe we could both take lessons together, hoping against hope that this might obviate the need for me to fill our peaceful apartment with a gigantic drum kit one of these days.
Yesterday, we went to the guitar store and bought ourselves a pair of Fenders, Jack’s black, mine cadmium red, and the attendant amps and stools and stands and stuff. (I was quite surprised how affordable guitars are, not cheap as, say, Tombow brush markers or glue sticks but not nearly as expensive as the titanium computer I’m writing this story on. I was always so impressed when Pete Townsend smashed a perfectly good guitar onto the unforgiving floor boards or when, in about 1980 and at CBGBs, I watched the Plasmatics bisect a plugged in guitar with a chainsaw and it bucked and screamed and finally fell in two, its strings geysering. I was most impressed not by the noise or the gesture but the sheer waste of money. Anyway, it turns out it wasn’t that much money after all). So now our apartment looks like backstage at Madison Square Garden, what with all this gear and amps and half empty bottles of JD standing around. First thing this morning, Jack walks into our bedroom wearing only a bathrobe and his guitar, ready to rock and roll. I had taught him the one song I know, learned when I was 15, the same song every one of my generation learns in order to impress girls, the opening chords of “Smoke on the Water” by Deep Purple.Dum, dum, dum. Dum dum de dum. Dum, dum, dum, dum de dum. So, Jack walks around, in his robe, hammering out the song and sounding much like the Plasmatics with a good Billy Idol curl to his lip.
This evening, when I got home from work, Russell, our teacher was half way through Jack’s lesson. Then it was my turn to learn how to sit, how to hold the guitar, how to curl my fingers into impossible contortions and press my delicate finger pads into the egg-slicer strings. Russell has decided that of son-and-pop, I am to be the first one to learn how to tune the “machine” as he calls it and showed me the first steps and then launched into an erudite monologue about the physics of sound. My innocent questions ricocheted his ample brain into all sorts of directions incorporating Aristotle, Euclidean geometry, Miles Davis’s early ineptness, the Well Tempered Clavier, electrical engineering, and the real difference between Sinatra and Torme. It was the sort of rich broth I love but, after an hour or so and with a sigh, we went back to filleting my finger pads.
I have always loved music of all sorts, however, it has always mystified me. I have half-heartedly studied other instruments before but the harmonica is the only one I have been at all fluid with and then, only in the shower. So music and the people who play it have all been suffused with magic. Musicians, particularly improvisational jazz cats, seem like another species, with some sort of extraterrestrial knowledge that I can never begin to comprehend. It’s a foolish sort of obstacle that I set up for myself so long ago, this absolute sense that I could never hope to play an instrument, even on an amateur level.
And yet, in my one lesson, I have already begun to feel the door inching open. One of the points that Russell emphasized to me was take the time to listen and savor the note. While my body is learning and stretching, my tendons lengthening, my bones shifting, I should give my mind the time to feel the music, to hear the decay of a note, to see how the sound emerges and then how the harmonics fall away. What I find fascinating is that, yet again, the lessons I learned in drawing are at the core of all creative effort.
To suspend time and to appreciate the moment.
To be gentle with myself and feel comfortable with ‘errors’.
To realize that no matter how few hairs I have and how grey they may be, I can always learn new things and that once I open my mind to learning, everything becomes a fresh lesson.
Finally, I am also so excited to be learning something with Jack, as he does. In many ways, he is a much better artist than I am — freer, bolder and clearer. I hope he never loses that way he has with making things. I am also interested to see what it is like to be as new to something as he is, to learn alongside him, to see how we tackle our frustrations differently. I think this guitar thing is going to be quite an adventure and a good investment of what little free time I have left. My true goal: to play “The Milkman of Human Kindness” or anything else by Billy Bragg.
“Freebird”, anyone?

When I was about nine, I developed a theory. What if everybody actually sees very different colors but calls them by the same names. Like, I look at a tree and see its leaves as a color I call ‘green’. When you look at the tree, you see a color that I would call ‘red’ but you call that color ‘green’. The only way to prove the difference would be if I could climb into your body and see through your eyes and say ‘hold on, you’ve got the colors all backwards.”
It wasn’t a terribly useful theory. Still, I’ve thought about it again quite often since starting my color class. What I’ve become increasingly aware of is how inaccurate my observations of color really are. I’m not colorblind and I have 20/20 vision but I rarely see what’s really in front of me. The root cause seems to be the same thing that blocked me from drawing all those years: converting reality into symbols. I’ve discussed before my discovery that when we reduce our observations to symbolic shorthand (that’s a car, that’s a building, that’s a person) we are forced to draw only symbols instead of accurate representations of the very specific reality that lies before us. If we are fairly well-versed in creating drawn symbols we can communicate the general ideas we perceive but can never capture the specific essence of what is there, in other words, draw accurately.
After a bit of practice and self discipline, we can all overcome this handicap and see and then draw the specific outlines of any scene from the angle we are viewing it. I, more or less, have done so. But now that I am paying a lot more attention to painting, I see how much I do the same old thing with color. “That car is yellow, that building is grey, her hair is brown.” When my paintings are more than cartoons or paint by numbers it’s because my ideas are a little more complex. “Her face is in shadow so let me add black or maybe mix a darker version of her skin tone.” “It feels sort of cooler over there so let me paint that part in blue”. Still, I am dividing the world up into the colors in my paint box and the few combinations I can confidently mix up from them. It’s all made up, a rational construction based on ideas rather than observation.
These days, though it’s still not reflected in my painting, I try to focus on the actual colors in my environment. As I walk through NYU, I try to isolate a patch of a wall and see what color it really is. “The wall seems brown, but that section in the shadow is really quite pink whereas that part on the cornice is silver or more accurately a color I can’t name but sort of a light and glowing grey with a bit of purple in it.”
It’s pretty overwhelming. So many hues and shades and values, hard to discern, difficult to remember, impossible to reproduce. But my goal isn’t really accuracy. It’s sensitivity. To learn to slow my brain and judgment down enough to absorb reality as it appears at this moment, here. Not to see the world in short hand, as a caricature, or a blur but to live life fully, from my particular place and angle. That, it seems to me, is very much the point of living.
If someone else jumped into my brain, perhaps they’d see a wall that’s brown. But I’d love to to see the whole rainbow reflecting back at me.

I’m no Archimedes, but I’ve had a disproportionate number of good ideas in the five minutes or so of my day I spend in the shower. I’ve explored a number of possible explanations.
My shower pressure is fairly powerful for a New York apartment and it generally hits me right at the base of the skull, stimulating the blood flow. But it’s only my medulla and my cerebellum lying right beneath and they are almost certainly not the source of the ideas that pop up. I tend to keep my frontal lobes away from the jets, except for the few seconds when I am washing my face or shampooing my few hairs. The only thoughts that cross my mind then relate to conditioner.
The sound of the water drumming on my skin and the acoustics of the tiles are fairly easy to reproduce outside the bathroom. But when I listen to the sound of falling water anywhere else it generally just makes me want to pee.
Maybe the water returns me to some primeval state; I read somewhere that the pattern of our hair growth indicates that humans went through some extended aquatic stage, living entirely in the sea. This hypothesis seems improbable and in any case I doubt that it was a particularly fecund stage of our history. Seals, whales, and mermaids, all live fairly banal sorts of lives and rarely win Nobel Prizes or have gallery openings.
Most of the things I do in the shower are mindless. That’s not entirely accurate: my mind is present but my judgment is suspended. I can hardly see, I can only hear white noise, I am all alone, and while I am doing things — working up lather, washing between each toes, getting as far down my back as I can reach — I’ve done them more than 14,000 times before and they are automatic.
The afternoon is generally when I give myself challenges and problems to solve. I do research, and kick around a few preliminary ideas. I may have taped up some ideas on the wall from the morning and I’ll look them over and try to push further. Half formed notions will rattle around my skull for the rest of the day, getting a polish in the cerebral rock tumbler before bed.
Then at eleven or so, I’ll hit the hay, hopefully for the whole night. (Sometimes ideas will wake me up at four, jolted to the surface by a passing fire or garbage truck. These ideas, while insistent in the dark, tend to look fairly ugly by the light of day, like half cooked pork.) By morning, my brain has been well- marinated and is ready to serve. I tend to take a shower 15 or so minutes after I wake up, and in that calm, consistent, non judgmental environment, the ideas feel safe to poke their heads out of my head and present themselves.
So the trick is not a matter of soap and water. It’s slowing down, clearing the mind, letting go, giving myself a few minutes of nothingness. And yet in that relaxed nothingness, there is bubbling activity. The only other place I’ve found such a paradoxical blend of tranquility and creativity is between the covers of my drawing journal.
Maybe I should get a waterproof pen and start drawing on the tiles.

I got my first mouse in 1983. It was attached to an Apple IIC, the grooviest PC to come along, a 9″ monitor, a carrying handle, white like the current Apple design standard. There was a program called Macpaint which let you make pixelated drawings but the only input device was the big clumsy mouse ( I’m not sure if scanners even existed), like drawing with mittens on*.
Things have come tremendously far since then but I have the same reservations I had twenty years ago.
Whenever I make a picture on the computer, it is a completely different experience from working with paper and pens and far less satisfying. This could be a function of skill but I doubt it. It certainly not due to any lack of variety on the part of the folks at Adobe; they give you enough tools and filters to fill a dozen art bins. And my computer can’t blamed; it’s wicked fast and I never feel constrained as I did in the old days waiting for things to render.
The problem comes down to how easily human error can be fixed on a computer. I can adjust and readjust, move things up and down, tweak this way and that, and burn hours and hours in repetitive, tedious monkeying around. If I don’t like it, I can immediately zap it.
And for me, that’s where the Art gets trashed.
There’s so many protective barriers between my humanity and the page. I can’t puddle my water, handmix my greens, rub a spot with my coat sleeve. I probably could get the accidental sprays of ink that come off my steel nib but it would take hours to do and the impulse would be gone. There’s no chance for serendipity, no forks in the road that force me to deal with my mistakes, no messes to clean up, far fewer lessons to learn.
It simply isn’t enough like Life.
———-
*I’m sure I have some of these historical facts wrong but, all you technohistory buffs out there, please don’t feel compelled to correct me.

Alfred Hitchcock meticulously planned out every shot in his films long before he set foot on the set. Then he waddled on with precise storyboards, his angles, lenses, lighting directions all completely worked out.
Most artists aren’t so controlled. Many of us sit down to a blank page with only an inkling of what we will do with it. Then we lay down the first lines, the first words, the first notes and begin to play around. While some novelists plot out their stories on index cards and detailed notes, others enjoy discovering where the plot will twist as much as their readers.
There is a danger inherent in either approach.
For the Planner, there is the danger of staleness, of uninspired, mechanical execution. Hitch found shooting a film to be quite a bore— he was simply executing the comprehensive instructions he had already laid out for himself and his crew. His films, while beautiful and gripping always have a certain cool, artificial quality because of his iron grip, and he rarely got the best performances from his actors.
But for the Free Spirit, there is quite another danger: the descent into mud. You look out the window to see the sun shining and the road beckoning and stride out, a sandwich in your pocket and a breeze in your hair, off to look for adventure. But, at some point in the journey, a storm may brew. The sky darkens, the horizon disappears behind clouds, the road fills with potholes and puddles and you, still driven and unwitting, plod on. Eventually you collapse — dirty, wet, miserable and lost.

When all of the colors of the spectrum merge, they form clear, pure white light. But when you combine all the colors in your paint box, you always get that same khaki brown.
Sometimes, particularly when I am painting, I will get a picture to a certain point and then, unhappy with the way it looks, I’ll go too far. I’ll deepen the shadows, I’ll strengthen the outlines, and then when I’m very desperate, I’ll introduce some garishly bright color to distract the eye, vermillion skies, chartreuse skin. It never works.
Painfully, it’s when I am doing a commission or making a present for someone that I am most likely to encounter this problem. Some part of my brain will not let go and sits in the background, whining and harping and firing suggestions. Instead of letting the piece takes its natural course, I try to twist it in a direction it doesn’t want to go and the results is mud.
I’ve seen this phenomenon in my career in advertising so many times. Because the process requires the approval and opinions of many people and compromise is often the watchword of the day, we slop a lot of mud. How often I’ve been working with a composer on the score of a TV spot only to have a client wade in with ‘issues’ and suggestions. Soon new layers of drums and strings and effects are thrown over the music until it is muffled under a blanket. The same happens with writing, as adjectives and claims get inserted at the last minute like tumors metastasizing on paragraphs that had been edited and polished until they were organic and easy on the ear. So often the reason is stated: ”Sure,you understand it the way you’ve written it, we understand it, but will the consumer understand it? Let’s emphasize the main points more strongly. “And so additional legs and wings and humps are sewn on to the monster, not because anyone’s gut instinct requires them but because of second guessing and lack of vision.
When Jack was in preschool, there was one teacher whose class always did the most amazing paintings. Each one was clear and sharp and intelligent, Picassos in a sea of muddy fingerpaints. I asked her what she taught her kids, what she said to keep their visions so pure. She replied, “I don’t tell them anything, really. I just know when to take their paper away.”