Peering Beneath the Surface

I had one of those moments recently, when you become aware of a thing, the essence of the matter. Call it an epiphany.?

I was driving through LA traffic, listening to an interview between Ezra Klein and literacy expert Maryanne Wolf about “Deep Reading”. It’s a fascinating and slightly unnerving conversation about our society’s drift into a mode of superficial skimming across a universe of digital media. Scroll, scan, scroll. It’s not that we don’t read. We’re surrounded by more text than our ancestors could have imagined. But in many ways we’re losing what it means to be literate, to lose ourselves in long form writing and sit in contemplation. To put a point on it, we’re increasingly valuing the speed and efficiency of gaining knowledge, and devaluing the road it takes to get there. Process has lost out to product. Ezra put it best - “It’s the time spent in the book that matters”.?

It got me thinking. What does time have to do with the creative process, and why does it matter? Why not make the thing as quickly as possible??

When I was in art school, a teacher of mine had an adage - Design Made Difficult. The idea was that the speed and default of the computer, the quickest solution, is by definition, the most expected, the most boring. “If you want it perfect, that’s fine, then do it in the computer”, he would say. In this counterintuitive approach, speed bumps and constraints (often analog) are introduced as a way of slowing down the creative process, encouraging observation and developing a deeper way of seeing. Think of it as a way of engineering more “happy accidents”.?

In the classic book Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, there’s a now well-known technique of drawing from an upside down photograph as a way of interrupting our left-brained way of seeing the world around us. When attempting to draw, an exercise that is concerned with shape and form, our brain defaults to a left hemisphere mode - the analytical, language oriented side of the brain - and it rushes in to define what we’re looking at. A chair, a hand, a face. A thing we know with a name. By disorienting the subject, the left side circuit is jammed and the right side takes over. Now, we’re able to draw what we see, in a space outside of language and knowing. By not taking the most straightforward path, we discover what's beneath the surface. We could call this Drawing Made Difficult.?

We're all rewarded for quick solutions. Speed matters. Move over, human. Hello, artificial intelligence. There’s a lively debate over whether AI is art, whether it’s the greatest invention since moveable type or whether it’s the devil. What’s for sure, is that it brings the idea of process, and efficiency, to the fore. Does it count if the image was derived by an expertly crafted string of prompts or by the push and pull of a human hand on a mouse??

The other night, I tried to make an image in Midjourney, sketching as way of developing an illustration that would accompany this article. Not bad, but not exactly a “voila” moment.?

I noodled around with my prompts, made a series of variations, and noodled some more.?40 minutes later, I arrived at something interesting, maybe even a “creation” of my own. I got lost in the process and found my way to something new.

I still don’t feel the same sense of ownership I get from old school making. It’s too much typing, roll the dice and wait, but it got me to a place of discovery and observation. I’d rather write and have the language be the thing, but I can definitely see how I could use it to generate ideas. I’m enjoying the new tool, and learning to hijack the process and make it my own- moving beyond the defaults and introducing some friction. AI Made Difficult.?

I recently moved out of a studio where I had the space to make physical objects, and as a result have been diving back into drawing. I really love it. As I’ve kept at it, I’ve discovered just how much the process of drawing fuels new connections and observations. I'm enjoying watching myself improve. How amazing that all we need is pen and paper to create a world!

I’m terribly guilty of skimming the surface. I scroll way too much and binge on bite sized nuggets. And when I open a book, it’s too often non-fiction. It’s getting close to that time of year when we make resolutions, and among mine would be to develop a habit of reading fiction in the new year. If my experience with drawing is a guide, it may take a bit of time before I’m good at it, but before too long I’ll get lost in the experience, and watch my mind slip into that space of deep reading. It’s the time spent that’s the thing.?