Art With One Person in Mind

Sometimes I like to create something just for one of my children. Here is an example:

Children, Calculators, and Agile Brains

Our children are so deprived!

When I was young, there was no such thing as a "calculator." [Well, okay, there was, but it was a person who made calculations, usually using pencil and paper.] We were taught to add, subtract, multiply, and divide by memorizing the basics and applying them to larger and larger numbers.

The only device available to help with large calculations was a slide rule (you might be able to see one in a museum, or else ask your grandfather is he still has his). Even with a slide rule, you had to keep the decimal point in your head and put it in the right place afterward.

Calculators were not even mass produced until I was in college, and a four function calculator (add, subtract, multiply, and divide) sold retail for $99.99. They couldn't make them fast enough. I know, because one of my summer jobs was on the production line where these first calculators were packaged. The line could not keep up with demand. While in college, there were rules that barred us from using these new devices on tests.

Throughout my school years (both secondary and college) almost all of my mistakes in math classes were arithmetical. I used the correct laws to combine or split terms, integrate or differentiate, distribute or commute. But I sometimes made a mistake in my arithmetic.

Now that some of my children are into higher math, I see that they are making the same mistakes. Should I allow them to use a calculator when they are doing exercises? I don't, for only by keeping in practice does one maintain the ability to work those problems. It keeps the mind agile. My son almost lost all of his arithmetical ability before I banned him from using his calculator for anything other than checking his work.

You might see this same principal in drivers. I know of one person who almost forgot how to get from home to a known destination, because they used their GPS every single time they got in the car. WAIT!!! GPS is a different discussion!

I do have to admit that there was a device called an Adding Machine, and it could handle fairly large numbers, but only businesses had those (in their accounting departments). We learned our arithmetic by rote, then applied it to larger and larger numbers (even ones that those early calculators and adding machines couldn't handle). The ability has served me well.

My children? They are soooooo deprived!

In addition to drawings of various kinds, I received an inspiration last year. I was doing some research and found some copies of illuminated manuscripts, including some several-hundred-year-old Bibles. Most of these manuscripts and Bibles have one page in five, or one in twenty, illuminated. They are pretty, but I began to think that it would be nice to have a Bible with every page illuminated. Of course, not every illumination is what I would like. So, of course, I thought, I can do that. So I started creating page borders that I could use. Above is one of the samples. Later this week I will post one of the sample pages.

Have you illuminated something, even just a note to a friend? I'd like to see it. perhaps we can inspire one another!

Older Art - Rougher Work

I wanted to give you an idea of what my doodling was like before it took form. The early ones were intended merely to fill up a page while enduring a meeting. I have some from six months prior to this one, and they have even less form and substance. Each one, though, was a training ground for future drawings. Few artists begin with a refined style. Nobody would accuse me, based on this doodle, of being refined. Some have, however, accused me of being an artist based on later works. I accept the title reluctantly. to me, it is just another reflection of God's grace.

You can do it, too. Start with what you can do. See where it takes you. Share the journey with me; I'd love to watch your progress.

Typewriters

Children today are so deprived! (Okay, many are also depraved, but that is not where this is going.)

My children have never had the pleasure of trying to prepare a written report on a typewriter. They have heard of them, and they have seen them in movies, but they have never had to use one. Those of us who are older remember such wonderful things as:
- the shift key actually lifting the entire carriage of the mechanism so that the upper case character would strike the ribbon instead of the lower case;
- getting our hands horribly messy trying to change the ribbon (it's what had the "ink" on it that formed the letter on the paper;
- going so fast that more than one lever tried to strike the paper at the same time, thus jamming the mechanism (okay, I was so slow - 30 words per minute - that I had to TRY to jam the mechanism);
- the fact that our modern keyboard was designed to slow us down; with the lever mechanism, even with this design, a good typist (one who could hit 50 ro more words per minute) would often jam it; almost any arrangement of keys, even a random one, once learned, would improve the speed; but to prevent jams they came up with this one; inertia prevents us from changing it;
- "correcting" mistakes by hitting the Backspace key, typing over the character with a different character, Backspace, another different character, etc.;
- the joy of that wonderful new product invented by the mother of one of the Monkees (truth) - that amazing little product that allowed us to correct mistakes that were ALMOST unnoticeable - White Out;
- carbon copies; when you "cc" someone on your e-mail, it stands for "carbon copy"; typing the same thing twice was a royal pain; for those of us with ten thumbs it was impossible; it wasn't long after the invention of the typewriter that someone came up with the carbon copy; if hitting a key against an inked ribbon could put the character on the page, then placing a thin sheet of inked paper between two sheets of paper would cause that same strike to place the same character at the same time onto a second sheet; carbon paper was also messy, but it saved a lot of time when you wanted to keep a copy of a business letter or such (even though White Out did not work on the cc);
- triplicate forms were tricky; you had to strike harder to get the character to come out readable on the third form;
- getting paper fed into the the typewriter was an art form - one that few of us ever mastered;
- some important parts of the typing lessons that I had in high school were about NOT looking at what I was doing - neither at the keyboard nor at the paper being typed; the teacher wanted us to look only at the handwritten item we were supposed to copy into type (more often it was a book that we were copying); looking back and forth from book or letter to keyboard or typed paper slowed us down - bad, bad bad; the problem was that the typewriter didn't tell you when you had run out of the paper; you were somehow supposed to know that without looking; I don't know how many sentences I typed that only had a portion of the characters on the paper and the rest on the cylinder against which it rested (and there were more that were typed only on the cylinder);
- having a manual mechanism that you pushed and pulled to place margins and tab stops;
- no Ctrl key; no Alt key; no Delete key; no Home or Enter; the carriage moved the paper to the left - one character each time you struck a character (fixed width font, like Courier); there was a large lever that you pushed to return the carriage to the right and advance the paper to the next line (thus the ASCII character "crlf" - carriage return / line feed);
- the bell near the end of the line (five characters away) to warn you that you could not get another whole word in, so you had better do the carriage return line feed thingy if you wanted to continue;
- ignoring the bell and typing a whole sentence on the 80th space on the line;
- not relying on electricity to get the job done;
- not losing anything when the power went out;
- remembering to cover the typewriter when not in use (or not remembering); they get horribly dusty if not covered; the dust jams the mechanism and gets on the stike levers, which in turn can mess up a character.

Okay, what have I forgotten? Let me know what other interesting aspects of typing I have failed to mention here.

More Reasons

Occasionally, I mix my styles. The above picture is not true Hiada art, although it is Haida style. I took the outline of a horse, stylized the mane and tail, and then filled in the body with Haida and non-Haida symbols. The sun is very much Haida.

I did a similar running horse with different internal designs (almost all Haida), and I placed both sun and moon in the background. I like both pictures, even though they would not qulify as Haida. Some things I do just for the fun of it.

Reasons for Your Subject

Sometimes, I have an image in my mind I want to get down. As I mentioned earlier, sometimes the blank paper suggests something, and I try to bring it out. Sometimes, someone has a specific image that they would like me to create.

My dentist has asked me to create some images for his seaside home, and I am part way through that.

The image above, however, was inspired by my wife. I do some border decorations for illuminated manuscripts, and I someitmes use flowers and leaves. My wife happened to say, "You ought to do a large flower."

This one is for you, Love.

Using Tools

Sometimes I want to do something a little different. I placed the inital outer circle and one set of arc guides with a compass, lightly and in pencil. I then went over those with my pen without the compass. It is quite easy to tell that I had no help drawing the ink lines, since they are definitely "out of round". Rarely, when I start a drawing, do I know what it will look like finished. Quite often, as I go along, I see something else in the blank paper and feel the need to bring it out. I finally understand the sculptors who say that they did not "make" a statue, but rather they got rid of all the stone that was not part of the statue. I trust you'll enjoy this