Last week, our daughter designed and built a roller coaster from materials at home. Watching the girl press against her 3rd grade deadline surfaced messy memories of late night college studios.
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Blonde bonobos bounced boorishly, brazenly belching behind brunette beavers belligerently bereaving burst bubbles by beige barbed birches.
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Angry aardvarks advertantly abducted an airship at Akita Airport absurdly assuming acerbic albatrosses abducted an adolescent aye aye.
Many years ago, a BoardGameGeek user in Australia asked me to receive several shipments before his arrival in Vegas to attend a friend’s steampunk themed wedding.
When he came to pick up the games, his wife gave me this pink handmade pillow with chibi Star Wars characters for my newborn daughter.
Last year, I joined Post.news. The open and accepting crowd inspired me to start drawing again after years of fearful, constipated dormancy.
I started a series of hand sketches forming the ASL manual alphabet.
After a few letters I started adding alliterative sentences.
A month into this exercise, I was forced back into the office.Reinserting a commute into my routine was so disruptive that I dropped the project before completing it.
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A couple weeks ago I also joined Substack Notes. One of the first folks I met was Charlene Storey, who started a weekly ritual to share pictures of “everyday magic”.
Given my interest in the mundane objects that surround us (I earned my 2003 NaNoWriMo by writing about the stuff in my tiny garage apartment), it’s a perfect way to jump into the new stream.
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I should finish the alphabet series, but I also like this new weekly thing and I don’t want to wait half a year before archiving these memories.
So for the next 26 weeks, I’ll be doing a series of unplanned diptychs. Let’s see how it goes.
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A wonderful failure, Architecture 101, 2001
I dropped this studio on the last day in class.
I would have failed anyways.
I spent my undergrad focused on the arts, not theory, much less jumping into the insanity of A Thousand Plateaus, by Deleuze and Guttari.
The studio was about the nomad. I picked the Truck Stop as my program and the site was the 16th Street Train Station, at the time completely abandoned.
Unlike the aborigines’ in Bruce Chatwin’s Song Lines, I stayed completely lost the entire semester.
I made a video of rubber ducks.
I visited a port terminal at the Port of Oakland (before 9/11 you could just drive up and ask for a tour).
I spelunked that Train Station multiple times.
I drove inland to check out real truck stops.
I mashed ramen onto a wood board (that didn’t go well).One night, my buddy threw a pack of cigarettes on a desk and we spent hours hashing out a grand scheme that looked promising.
The next morning I reviewed it with my professor. She agreed it was a good start.
I pulled out my drop papers. She happily signed it to avoid failing me.
That was my last day of class at UC Berkeley.
The main takeaway from the studio was to trust myself.
Raveevarn Choksombatchai was a brilliant professor who would ask pointed questions every time I met her. As a young designer, I earnestly took in every critique.
Her pedagogical approach was to be the devil’s advocate. She stress tested my convictions. That would be a fun studio nowadays, but I wasn’t ready.
Her challenges convinced me to reassess everything every time. Starting over twice a week is a great way to get nowhere.
I’ve since realized that the grand concept is only the seed of a project. Part of the designer’s job is to say “fuck it, good enough, move on”.
There are plenty of problems at that next scale. Architecture is more than a conceptual art; it’s also a craft. Design challenges will confront you at every level along the way.
Don’t let (yourself or someone else) stop you at gestalt.
I’ve gone in quite a different direction from those high concept Berkeley days. Indeed, I don’t design. In the past five years, I’ve done four sketches, my last one locating one door in a short corridor.
But the lesson of this failed studio still lingers.
Not a painful barb, but a gentle reminder to trust myself.
My ideas aren’t perfect, but I know they’re good enough for taking that next step — cause analysis paralysis is so much worse.
I don’t think you can ask for a more impactful lesson coming out of college.
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The Tracks, 2000
I snuck out of Berkeley with an architecture degree even though I only completed one architecture studio (while dropping out of a second architecture studio, taking three visual studies studios and one landscape architecture studio).
The landscape studio consisted of a series of quick projects, including this exploration of remediating an abandoned rail line using plants to pull heavy chemicals out of the soil.
It seemed fitting to share this long buried project for Earth Day.
This studio was as much an art studio as a design studio, which isn’t a surprise when you check out Professor Chip Sullivan. This piece was an homage to old science fair presentations, with infographics and drawings, using oil pastels and ink.
With the re-discovery of my old fountain pen late last year, I am now finally finishing the very last of that red ink, twenty three years later.
Over a cup of coffee, my friend defined a group of design students who are basically art majors. There is much appeal to straddling both worlds. What can be better than savoring a creation with no “ifs” about how it might actually be in “real life”? To make is the most primal human activity. Yet “to make” also encompasses “to imagine”. To think a drawing represents a viable space 57,600 times its size, to believe “these” certain lines will best direct the movement of hundreds of people over the next fifty years — that demands imagination. A design education challenges and refines raw imagination. For those who cannot rise above the flatland of pure art or refuse to descend from a theoretical ivory tower, let them remain trapped. While the opportunity remains, I will precariously attempt to scale both worlds high on caffeine.
It’s a bit cringe to read what you wrote as a 20 year old.~
Hindu thought includes a roadmap of life with four stages. These college drawings were the climax of my work as a Student.
In their system, I should be wrapping up my time as a Householder, but I’ve got another fifteen years before Retirement (I doubt the ancient system expected folks to be making babies in their late thirties…or Social Security age limits).
Even though I might be late on the ancient Hindu time schedule, I’ve noticed that my attitude has changed towards work in the past eighteen months. I’ve lost appetite for business books. I still think about my role as a project manager, but I no longer study “leadership”. I work a hard 40 hours, but I’m not turning that dial up to 11.
I wonder if that next stage in life will be in letters, as with my little library, or if it will be a return to making art.
If it’s the latter, I need to make some space to get messy. It’s been much too long since I’ve gotten my hands dirty.
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Orpheus, 1998
Early April is a time of birth and death in my life.
My mother’s birthday was last week.
A church acquaintance drowned in Hawaii over spring break.
A friend committed suicide two decades ago.
A colleague lost her daughter almost ten years ago.
My son was born five years ago.
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Aside from mom, all that was future when I took a “Word and Image” studio with Tony Dubovsky.
One of the big projects was to pull something from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. I landed on Orpheus.
The final sculpture was made of wire with a paper mache skin of tracing paper stained with acrylic paint. The translucent piece hung from the ceiling.
I might have a photo of it hidden at my parent’s house. I should dig it up one day.
I should also to read Metamorphoses one day. There is copy buried in the garage in one of many boxes of books.
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Sway the Head and Shake the Tail
On Thursday I tried drawing the boy who told me to draw the tricycle instead.
And a Figure 8 to start a quiet Sunday morning (since I decided that work can wait till Monday).
Outline of a tricycle from behind, drawn in red ink on a yellow steno pad. Line doodle sketches of the boy climbing around his chair. Red ink on a yellow steno pad with old pencil notes and sketches. Sketch from my Ba Dian Jin instructional book. The head is way oversized, maybe because we watched My Neighbors the Yamadas for the past couple of weekends. (The kids love it!) -
Wise Owl Gazes Backwards
I feel like I’ve got a decent handle on bodies when I’m paying attention. I might switch to focusing on heads.
Threw in some more architectural scalies. Reminds me of that one day where I spent twelve hours practicing architectural lettering. Have it down for the rest of my life.
Unfortunately it’s a dead art. Though I’ve used it on handwritten thank you notes after interviews to show I’m a real old school draftsman.
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Swiss 1JJ, Page of Wands
I copied the drawing while waiting for files to upload to the server
I used the classic upside down technique…but ran out of room at the bottom of the notepad for the top of the head.
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Separate Heaven and Earth
Monday was crazy so first thing Tuesday is to catch up on yesterday’s figure. Maybe I’ll get a second round in this afternoon.
(I threw in some architectural scalies for fun.)
I’m reusing my notepad with sketches for the 6 of Swords….and this is now my desk pad so the rest of the white space will eventually get filled in (and green highlighted when completed).
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Bad Figures
At the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego I contemplated my recent decision to draw more (than nothing everyday). One gallery had paintings with several highly stylized figures. I committed the classic response to modern art.
I could do that!
Spoiler alert: I can’t.
This idea pushed me to finally attack the white whale of drawing figures. I’m so bad, even my architectural scalies look awful. This is way out of my comfort zone but it’s time to attack the issue in a concentrated fashion.
I’m calling this Figure 8’s . The series is to draw a human figure for +/- 8 minutes, for x8 days.
At least for 08 days to go with the 8 brocades, maybe up to 78 (tarot deck) or 18, 28, 68, or 88 (for good luck).
Yesterday, I started with image of a guy stretching upward. I didn’t use a reference and …. umm yeah … this makes my scalies look like palatable.
The drawing today was from the cover of my exercise book, the second callisthenic shooting an arrow. I’ll do exercises 3-8 from the book before I venture back out into my imagination.
The girl got a good laugh when she saw these drawings, she even got her brother upstairs to join in the fun. It may be good for them to see dad fail miserably…and hopefully get better by the end. Given how quickly she picks things up in school, I worry she has developed a fear of failure. So hopefully this will encourage her to take some risks and fail graciously a few times before the stakes get too high in life.
