Seeing detail
Brian looked at the quick outline I'd drawn of Scull's Angel by John Chamberlain.
"Good," he said. "You've done a great job simplifying the shapes." [Unspoken commentary: which is not what I asked or expected you to do.]
"Now," he said, "try to capture what you see--all the idiosyncrasies, the imperfections."
The sculpture's basically a crushed car, man--everything about it is idiosyncratic.
My drawing, however, had reduced it to smooth, generic, almost geometric lines.
With one comment, this teacher identified what's demanded these days--and what I fight with--in my writing, my scholarship, my clinical work, my spirituality, my relationships:
Get specific. Fill in the details. Know one thing intimately. Don't generalize.
For the rest of that particular exercise, I focused on allowing the pencil to create the precise curves, warps, and crinkles in the metal; in the next exercise, on tearing sheets of paper to resemble the exact strokes of a Motherwell masterpiece.
Seeing and communicating detail is nothing like capturing the perfect, objective, almost-Platonic form I automatically look for "behind" or "within" what's in front of me.
Yet that's what accuracy requires--in thinking about Jesus, in relationships with those who are different, in simple sketches meant to get us out of our heads and into the world.
Seeing detail, being mindful of what's in front of us, can be difficult to do.
I wouldn't have acknowledged it until this afternoon, but too often, I--like many (Western, white, male, modern?) people--want to find the universal in the specific, the abstract in the particular, the essence in the idiosyncratic.
For me, it's a desire to identify and possess the perfect, but to keep my distance at the same time.
Too often the results (in art, in theology, in writing, in human interaction) are like a huge, shiny, deep red, supermarket apple that tastes like Styrofoam.
(cross-posted at www.spondizo.net)
"Good," he said. "You've done a great job simplifying the shapes." [Unspoken commentary: which is not what I asked or expected you to do.]
"Now," he said, "try to capture what you see--all the idiosyncrasies, the imperfections."
The sculpture's basically a crushed car, man--everything about it is idiosyncratic.
My drawing, however, had reduced it to smooth, generic, almost geometric lines.
With one comment, this teacher identified what's demanded these days--and what I fight with--in my writing, my scholarship, my clinical work, my spirituality, my relationships:
Get specific. Fill in the details. Know one thing intimately. Don't generalize.
For the rest of that particular exercise, I focused on allowing the pencil to create the precise curves, warps, and crinkles in the metal; in the next exercise, on tearing sheets of paper to resemble the exact strokes of a Motherwell masterpiece.
Seeing and communicating detail is nothing like capturing the perfect, objective, almost-Platonic form I automatically look for "behind" or "within" what's in front of me.
Yet that's what accuracy requires--in thinking about Jesus, in relationships with those who are different, in simple sketches meant to get us out of our heads and into the world.
Seeing detail, being mindful of what's in front of us, can be difficult to do.
I wouldn't have acknowledged it until this afternoon, but too often, I--like many (Western, white, male, modern?) people--want to find the universal in the specific, the abstract in the particular, the essence in the idiosyncratic.
For me, it's a desire to identify and possess the perfect, but to keep my distance at the same time.
Too often the results (in art, in theology, in writing, in human interaction) are like a huge, shiny, deep red, supermarket apple that tastes like Styrofoam.
(cross-posted at www.spondizo.net)
posted by Duane at 8:48 PM
1 Comments:
This is a powerful comment on the entire thought of Taoism, and those forms of western spirituality that understand the present moment to be the Word through which the divine Presence speaks and acts. Thanks for it, Duane.
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