Drawing without knowing what I am about to draw.
Have you ever been away from home for some time, traveling in other countries or out camping for a week or more, returning back to find your familiar home different?
Oh boy. It is all-in-all past a hundred pictures since I first started drawing myself in the mirror. It is a wonder the mirror is still holding up without fractures with my ugly face staring into it every day.
What is even stranger is that I had just begun to NOT understand what I am looking at. Each day after working on it for some moments, something new tends to pop up if I am ready to receive it. Yet it is faster to loose that moment than it is to get a glimpse of that which is refreshing.
Here I post a series of 9 drawings done one day apart (from the series done so far).
How is it that they look different although 'objectively' speaking what is in front is more or less the same?
What makes the difference? Is the change an external phenomenon or one coming from the internal?
In the example I used using travel, the act of exposing ourselves to a drastic deviation of our external environment had re-sensitized us such that when we returned to our 'familiar' space, we see it with fresh eyes/senses. Things that we no longer found interesting (because they have become a concept in our mind) became alive once again because we had allowed ourselves to experience it as if for the first time.
However it is not uncommon for that momentary freshness in experience be subdued once again by our mind saying "I know all these already". Following that 'objectification'/'structuring' of things, the process of how we look at things becomes deaden once more with things around us. Things we think we already know but truly only knew one particular aspect of it. The ordering that we had imposed had become the filter that prevents us from experiencing more. For many people, we were taught to believe that that plastic simplicity is what we need. But do we? If so, why do we actively do things that could provide us with new sensation although in most cases failed terribly to achieve that?
Based on the above analogy, as I begin drawing/painting each day, The external that is 'static' is incredibly dynamic if 'I' am ready to see it with 'new' eyes! The quieting of the ego makes the world louder.
By looking very sincerely, even the slightest shift in where I look at causes an overhaul in the entire image.
On Application
(There is a lot more to talk about and I will, progressively) A lot of people are anxious to know the significance of such realization and doing this kind of exercise. I have been asked this question repeatedly "What has this got to do with animation?".
Firstly, the question is a peculiar one. It has to do with everything we do, the way we live and more - the world we are part of and live in! Not in one particular aspect of animation, not in one department of animation but the WHOLE and much more.
If the same process is applied to our making animation, every piece of work would have been vastly different! Imagine that! Isn't that very thought already exciting!
The commercial animation we see are so similar to one another because of the very fact that we believe 'that is the way to do animation'. So many schools and studios are shy to approach it with a fresh eye in fear that the end result are unemployed people. The arguments are familiar and the same-- production pipeline, money, audience's needs and principles etc. Everyone is just short of saying "The audience is dumb. Let's jilt them and walk away with their money".
Although the bottom line is much talked about, reality reflects a great rift between the actual stimulated experience the audience received in watching a film and the goals set by people who make them. Audience from time and again has to make tons of concession for the films in order to justify that their money was well spent. We ourselves as audience did that when we stepped into the cinema too so many a times.
The opposite of the vernacular are stuff showcased in the RES Festival (www.resfest.com). A lot of films/shorts that are screened are very refreshing. The audience walks away refreshed, excited, stimulated, enriched and ENTERTAINED.
If we search deep enough as an artist, it is inevitable that we will soon begin to search inwards. The answer is not 'out there' nor is it 'in here'. There is no distinction. But our love for the tangibles created a deliberate segregation, thus setting us on a journey that are full of goals. Goals that become limits to what we are truly capable of.
As I did (and am still doing) extensive studies into the approaches that people who did any kind of great work took, be it fine art/film/plays/music/science/cooking/whatever, there is something always present. They did not start trying to get somewhere or start trying to produce 'that' something. What they were invested in was a process -- a process whereby the discovery and learning are done through working and NOT work to illustrate what they had discovered or learned.
In Jean Detheux's words:
"see, do, understand" and NOT "see, understand, do".