Bird vocabulary

Birds are a part of our everyday environment, while at the same time carrying portentous meanings. The mostly commonly seen birds will be known to virtually everyone. For a birder, a bird seen several times over the course of several years will not be "rare," simply uncommon. Birds seen every day or week or month form the basic vocabulary, expanded from there into more species. Being able to rapidly identify a common bird is helpful, because it serves a point of comparison. 

Literally too, our visual vocabulary corresponds to a nomenclature. We have extra adjectives or descriptors to distinguish species, instead of just duck, goose, sparrow.  

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I guess I'm looking for a pretentious way to express a rather dumb and basic idea: we see common birds commonly, and know the words for them. Birding is [simply] an extension of that.   

Novel

Marks on Paper

So I have broken down what I want to do in several steps.

*Make marks on paper

[I've done that]

*Keep doing it enough so that it becomes habitual.

[Yes.]

*Find something interesting in the marks I've made.

[Starting to do that]

*Develop some techniques or procedures for doing something of interest.

[Starting to do that]

*Define a particular project. It could be a series of visual poems, or a comic book.

*Actually do this project. Produce something.

*Publish or diffuse it in some way.

At no point does the question of something being good or bad enter into it. I prefer to think of it as interesting or not interesting. It would be fine to learn to draw realistically, etc... that may or may not be interesting, and "badness" would be synonymous with a lack or realism, right?

Focus?

My music project is focussed. I know what I have to do: make up more songs and learn to play them, record them. I play every day and I come up with new songs once in a while. I will go back into the studio in July or August to record.

My visual art project is unfocussed and foundering. I make images every day, and post some to Facebook, but I don't have a coherent goal in mind. Let's assume the problem isn't talent, or lack of it, or even skill, because, if I'm not a talented visual person, I'm not a particularly talented musician either. That's largely irrelevant.

Maybe you can give me some advice on this. Is it the nature of the medium, the fact that the image is there to be looked at and judged whereas the song lives in time? How can this project become less amorphous?

No, you aren't a "visual person"

Well, you are, but not in the way you mean it. Everyone is visual, just about, in that almost everyone uses vision daily in various quite sophisticated ways. Saying you are a "visual person" is really not saying anything at all. People will say this who can only draw stick figures, simply because they are insecure about not having information in writing in front of them.

Intimidation

When I have a huge drawing pad with nice paper, I freeze up. Give me a napkin or the back of a torn envelope and I am in business.

Naive

Of course I do not know what I am doing. That is obvious, or where this might be headed.

Notes

Here are some notes I took once. Writing itself is a visual art.

Eyeglasses

I found some images in an old sketch book. Some images are dated 2004, so this was twelve years ago when I was exploring drawing for the first time. It's probably ok that I dropped this pursuit. I think I didn't know how to make it work for me at that point. I wanted to learn to draw. Now, instead of doing this, I want simply to explore visual perception through drawings. If I happen to learn to draw slightly better through this process, all the better.

How good is it? / How good am I?

With a drawing or a song, I can ask, how good is it? Or I can ask, how good am I at doing this? These are usually the wrong questions, though they are different from each other. Am I a good songwriter? I don't really care, because nothing is of consequence in the answer. Is a song good? If I like it myself, that is enough for me. If you like it, even better. I could be a good songwriter and write a song that's not as good as another, etc... Tons of people hang up their art works in coffee shops around town. Some is fantastically good, some is not, but it shouldn't really matter to the artist what I think.

I do things seriously, whether I am an amateur at any particular thing. In fact, I have decided to pursue hobbies seriously rather than thinking of them as something I am bad or good at. Thinking you are bad at something is every bit as much of an ego move as thinking you are good. To invest serious effort simply means that you think of the activity itself as more significant than your ego investment in it.

Shame is a factor. For example, I have played piano in the student union for anyone walking by. I don't have to feel embarrassed any more, because I realized that nobody really cares how well I play, if they are listening at all in the first place.

It's the same with everything I do, except that I am a professional literary critic slash academic, so there I have criteria which are common to the field of inquiry itself. They are commonly held, and I have my own preferences on top of that, my own quirks.

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If you confuse "how good am I" with "how good is it" you will be in trouble. Suppose you write a paper for school in two hours. The paper might not be good, yet, because it is not really done yet. You might be good at writing papers, but you haven't spent enough time with this one yet. If you spend endless time and still can't make the paper good, it means you aren't good at it... yet. You need to write many papers in order to learn how to do it. The ego is mostly a hindrance: you need basic confidence, but you need to be able to look at a piece of work outside of yourself and see what needs to be fixed.

Purposeless purposefulness

When creating any type of creative work (and scholarship is part of this) one must be purposeful yet at the same time act in semi-random, indirect, or lateral ways. You want to work for a finite period of time each day, and explore only a few concepts. I was interested today in what the veins of leaves are. In Spanish it is called "nerviación" or "nervadura." They are visually fascinating. I heard in my head the phrase "la nerviación de la hoja de laurel" from a poem by Claudio Rodríguez. We know there is a kind of seam down the middle of a leaf, and the nerves or veins branch out from there symmetrically, more or less, and then there are other little lines that branch out from the main veins. These are visually fascinating.

Leaf Man

Here is an image for a series I might call "superheroes." This is Leafman.

Eerie Lanscape

Visual II

Obviously I'm no artist, but I kind of like this one, the product of my first day of this project. Some crumpled up paper on a coffee table, or, on another scale, an abstract sculpture?

Visual

So what if I spent an hour a day working on visual perception? How would the result compare to my songwriting abilities? The idea is not so much to learn to draw, or to create art works, but simply to add that to what I already do. The original idea was to create a cover image for a cd of my songs, but I bought this book in Evanston called The Artist's Eye, by Peter Jenny, which inspired me.