Painting the White Pillar

I’ve been working on and off for a few years on this tall, thin painting. Some of it was learning geometry first. Turns out that heptagrams are kinda complicated. Squares in circles, not so much, but yin-yangs are deceptive — they look easy but there is an undergirding complexity.

The statue at the base is by my friend, Albert Sussler. He’s a much better artist than I am: an American, Japanese-trained, master potter.

Part of me is reluctant to put my painting on display like this, half finished. It’s not done. It may never be done. Oh well — that’s how these things go sometimes. The point is that te artist and the designer are creators, principally. Sometimes teu create work within an existing theme, as here; sometimes they create utterly unique and semi-original works. The artist makes for himself; the designer makes for others— yet both are committed o the core act of making. Of shaping. Of calling something into being.

I had help, of course. Geometry teacher is Andrew Sutton — I learned from his book,
Ruler and Compass. The pillars came from the western mystery traditions by way of English esoteric training in magic, apparently. The paint came from Michael’s supply, the brushes and canvas the same.

Where is your creative power taking you? Or is it just sitting over there on the ground?

Taiji Day 366: Bit of a let-down, really.

Yesterday I had lunch with my friend Topher after a morning in the Design Lab getting set up for a workshop this morning. (I’m teaching fourth graders the core skills of graphic design in a 2-hour workshop: page layout, hand-lettering and font selection, thumbnailing, color choice, page hierarchy, and so on.) After that, I worked on a couple of art projects at home (and gave myself a mild burn with the wood-burner — a wonderful tool but dangerous as all get-out; though admittedly not as bad as a buzz saw). Then I went up to my local metaphysical shop to get candles for a thank-offering to the angels today, Day 366 (I haven’t figured out what I’m going to label tomorrow’s work).

While I was there, I ran into someone who I’d done a prayer card for, based around a pair of angels from the Mansions of the Moon: one of the angels was the angel of the day, and one of them was the angel when she was next going to see a doctor about her cancer. That was maybe two weeks ago that I did this. Today, I find out that that doctor’s visit went swimmingly well, and she asked for another one, for her next appointment. I made it for her, right then and there, and wound up being given all the candles and things I was planning to buy. We’re all connected, right?

And I wound up making another card based on the 26th Mansion of the Moon: The Forespout of the Bucket, showing a woman washing and combing her hair. And after my little candle-shopping trip, I came home and made her in my book. Here she is: You can’t get as good results from looking at a picture of her, as drawing her yourself, but she’s plenty strong for a lot of different kinds of work. And this customer — customer? friend — also got the First Mansion, on the other side of the card. Because she needs Tagriel to wash and comb the cancer right out of her system; and Geniel to chase it off.

So, all things considered, yesterday was a pretty awesome day: completion of a year of tai chi; anticipation of a great day tomorrow and a clean-up of the Design Lab; lunch with a friend; some artwork; some magic work; and some down-time for meditation and rest. Lovely.

In that light, today’s tai chi practice was a bit of a let-down. I mean, sure… I’m stronger than I was a year ago, but I’m not stronger than yesterday. It’s like… it’s like when I turned forty. I was forty for a a week, and everybody was asking me if I felt older or if I was worried now that I was on the wrong side of the Big 4-zero!? And of course, I didn’t. I didn’t feel any different on one side of the number than on the other. It’s just a day.

Because, as much as we’d like to believe that things will be different on the exact day, they aren’t. And today’s no different. I had an absolutely terrific Ward off Left early in the form; and I missed my left hand-touch in the Windmill Kick near the end. Yesterday, my Golden Pheasants were rock-solid, but my Low Kicks were unexciting. How often are all of these practiced moves going to be magical, all on the same day? Not often. But when they are, it should clue us in: there’s no guarantee that the rest of the day will be magical. It all depends on how awake you are.

Am I as awake today as I was yesterday? Maybe, maybe not. How about tomorrow? Will the day ever arrive when I have an absolutely perfect practice?

Who cares? This is today’s practice. Enjoy it.

Thumbnailing

At right is a photo of a symbol set for thumb nailing — rough
outlines of Titles, Map, Subheadings, borders, bullet lists, text blocks, portrait and landscape images, graphs and symbols and piecharts, and so on.  All the rough parts of a student’s visual presentation design in rough, easy to draw symbolism.

And below, just few samples of more than a dozen designs for posters that I produced (along with another sixty or so that my students produced) in the space of about fifteen minutes, using basic thumb-nailing skills.

I showed students these symbols, and then set a timer.  As the timer wound past every two minute mark, I asked students to switch from portrait to landscape and then back again. Each student created about a dozen thumbnail sketches of visual presentations that they might do in the future.

The Challenge of Preliminary Work

One of the things that’s really hard for students is to get past the monkey-mind fear-of-failure.  There is so much concern about doing a specific assignment “right” that they can’t often let go of themselves enough to do a lot of interesting preliminary work.  So we have to model or imagine that work for them and create opportunities for them to do that work despite themselves.  How do we get students to do enough preliminary work that they can imagine more possibilities for themselves than just their “first go” at a problem that we the teachers set for them?

We have to create opportunities for them to brainstorm multiple pathways forward.

Which is what I did on Friday.  I taught kids to brainstorm using thumbnail drawings, and to generate multiple possibilities in four minutes or less.

It’s a great way forward. Require them to produce quantities of work, without giving them too much time to think about the quality of any one piece.  It’s a radically different kind of training, of course.  Rather than asking for one piece of work, I asked them for an indefinite number of pieces of work.  And the result is that they (and I) generated about a dozen possibilities each for their (and my) work moving forward.

In essence, I taught them to brainstorm without telling them they were brainstorming.  I gave it a name that even took away the fear of brainstorming.  But by generating all these thumbnail drawings, I gave them the possibility of solving problems in multiple ways.

We’ll see if it last through vacation.

Mansion 28: belly of the fish

Mansion 28: belly of the fish
Originally uploaded by anselm23

Today, while the Moon was at the Midheaven and in the 28th Mansion, I completed the write-up and the image-making of the “Belly of the Fish,” and in the process learned a bunch of things about copying art, and making art.

First things first. This image is a rough parallel of the work of Nigel Jackson, as seen in the book Mansions of the Moon by Christopher Warnock, esq.. It’s hardly an exact copy — Nigel has much more skillful line and dot work than I have, and he presumably had a much larger canvas on which to work, which I don’t have. I did borrow the rough outline of his work — dhow in the middle, rocks on either side, fish below the boat, stars above. And some of my figures were done with reference to his. I don’t think I could have drawn the smaller fish around my big fish without reference to his image, for example.

But one of the things I’ve said before about this work, of course, is that doing it once has a tendency to connect you artistically and energetically to the picture and to the forces it represents. I feel fairly confident that I’ll be drawing this one again sometime, and that I’ll have an increased sensitivity to the image, and that, gradually, I’ll be able to compose the image on my own. It’s really the nature of the path of this kind of magical/artistic work — first you copy the masters, then you improve the quality of your Seeing, and then you improve the quality of your Working. The Copying is a preliminary to the Seeing, the Seeing is a preliminary to the Working, and all three are preliminary to the Mastery of the Work. One cannot produce the masterpiece before one has served the apprenticeship.

Via Flickr:
Completed the 28th mansion of the moon today. This marks sixteen completed images, which means I have twelve to go, to complete all of them.

Amnixiel is the angel of the 28th mansion. He’s for completion, for harvests, for increase of merchandise, for peace between spouses, for besieging cities, to travel safely by road (but to bring evil to sailors), or to hide or destroy treasure.

I took the dhow and some of the design for the stars from Nigel Jackson’s version of the image, and the arrangement of the rocks, and the rough shape of the fish. However, I used more of my own work in the process of laying out the water around the fish.

Pop-Up Book: Five Elements

I’ve been working on this pop-up book for a while, and I used Vine (thanks for the recommendation, Gordon!) to make a miniature video of the images in the book. The interface seems a little clunky for Vine; frankly, though, the interface of a pop-up book is pretty clunky, too.

Anyway, here’s the still images from Flickr:

 

Are there things wrong with these books? Sure.  I think that I would re-design them next time so that the background panel is the same color as the Element itself; and I would do a better job of building the landscape suggested by each of the four Elements: the dawn meadow, the summer greenwood, the beach at autumn, the winter forest.  I’d also try to do a better job of suggesting the other symbols related to each element, like the signs of the Zodiac, and such.  But hey, it’s a pop-up book, and my first such book completed, and I’m pretty proud of it.  Sure, you can’t exactly read it to your kid over an iPhone or a Kindle, but it’s not bad.

Along these same lines, I ran a class today in how to use the 3D printer at school, and I taught seven kids the drawing schematic suggested by Dave Gray (which I call the Semigram).  If you haven’t taught yourself this basic set of drawing instructions, and taught at least one other person how to use it, YOU ARE MISSING OUT.  None of what you see in the photographs attached to this blog post would have been possible without that visual training, however brief, however simplistic.  I cannot stress enough how important it is to have at least some basic drawing skills built into a Design Thinking plan at school, and you cannot get past this particular hump if you keep telling yourself, “Oh, I’ll never be able to draw.”  This book was drawn with scissors and glue, as much as with pen; but it took the knowledge of the drawing aptitudes to be able to construct the book.  It involves a way of seeing the world.

Oh, yeah.  And magic. Without magic, and some intentional investigation of the Mysteries of the Western Tradition (like alchemy, and magic, and suchlike) this book wouldn’t have been possible, either.

 

First decan of Aquarius

First decan of Aquarius
Originally uploaded by anselm23

Started a new illustration project today. I’m gearing up to do some posters for our spring musical, Annie, so I’m trying to get my figure-drawing and composition skills up to speed. As regular readers know, I prefer drawing in frames to not drawing in frames; the spinning woman is a rough crib from an image I found on Scottish Tartans Authority, while the man is a completely made-up figure. He’s not bad, but I wish I’d shown him in profile, now that he’s inked, with a clipboard or an abacus in hand. Poor prudent man, utterly without hands!

One of the things that I like about the Decans images or “Faces” as they’re called in traditional astrology, is that they’re each supposed to be a little story that you can tell to clients about the nature of their problem. A book containing all thirty-six decans, and a parallel book containing all twenty-eight mansions, contains sixty-four little stories about the world, each of which could speak to the experiences of people living in it.

This one, for example, contrasts the prudence of the man with the industry of the woman. He watches her work, but his own work isn’t specified. He’s ‘prudent’, which suggests he’s careful with his money, and she’s industrious. Yet the nature of her work is that it goes in circles, and she can never produce more than her hands can work. There are real limits on their industry — partly limited by technology, partly by his non-working nature, partly by their own ambition. Aquarius as a sign, as I understand it, is partly about limitations and boundaries, and this first Decan image is a pretty strong reminder that you can be hard-working, and industrious, and prudent, and still get nowhere. You might love your work, as Venus suggests; and yet the hard limits on your world mean that you’re not going to grow or achieve any great degree of success.

The medieval astrologer might look at this image and conclude for a client, Get in there and do some of the work yourself, or he might say, invest in better technology or he might say, you’re doing what you love, but don’t expect to get rich off what you’re doing. Or he might obviate all of that, and point out some of the limits in that person’s life and work, and suggest some ways around it.

The idea that the Decans are intended to be teaching stories packed with good advice, or reminders about ways to enter good situations or avoid bad ones, is really appealing to me. It means that eventually, I could make them big, and use them as teaching tools in school or elsewhere.

Via Flickr:
Following Benjamin Dykes who himself is following Agrippa in the construction of an image for the first Decan of Aquarius: “A prudent man, and a woman spinning” — A prudent man, and of a woman spinning; and the signification of these is in the thought and labor for gain, in poverty and baseness.

I take this, with the two related planets of Venus and Saturn, to represent a mindset intent on gain through craft or artisanry, with the intention of achieving economic success. They have a creative enterprise in mind, and they go after it… except the man is in a supervisory role rather than an assisting role. There’s too much administration in this business, and not enough actual making. The result is a tendency toward poverty and decline rather than success.

Creative Work For Others

Scroll of Power
Originally uploaded by anselm23

I’ve had much more success lately at doing interesting and useful work for others, than for myself. A few months ago, I was asked to assist in doing some prosperity work involving a fountain dedicated to Jupiter at a local shop — which, as near as I can tell, worked. Odd, that. What was odder still was that the fountain broke after a few months, right after a major repair to the shop’s infrastructure was required. The owner had the money to pay for the repairs, but then the fountain broke. And one of the employees there has been asking me to do something new.

It’s been my experience that magic, like design, never quite works the same way the second time around. It’s part of the reason Apple never recycles its hardware cases from one design to the next: they design a completely new case or frame to go around a redesigned machine for a reason, and that reason has a lot to do with the dream and hope of the “new and improved”.

So, it’s a little early to tell if this is going to work for the shop in the way that they, and I, want. She only got it this morning, after all. But, it feels good to do work for someone else, and provide them with a tangible object of material benefit.

What’s the relationship between magic, and Design Thinking? It’s a harder question to answer. The late-Medieval/early-Renaissance author Henry Cornelius Agrippa states that the magician’s power lies in knowing the three-fold virtues of the universe, namely the virtues of plants and stones and woods; the virtues of measurements and patterns rooted in mathematics; and finally the realm of spirits and spiritual qualities. I’m paraphrasing, but I think that there’s a powerful relevance to design, and to design thinking. If a magician’s job is to know the three-fold virtues of the universe, then a designer’s job is likewise to know the three-fold virtues of the universe — because the designer, like the magician, is tasked with the duty of taking real-world materials and tools, measuring them and parcelling them out in the proper ways according to rules of mathematics and science, and making something to excite the human spirit with love and wonder.

Increasingly I think of myself as a designer rather than as a teacher, or a magician. But I don’t think I could have been a designer without being a teacher or a magician first. I needed to wrestle with the core concepts of those three-fold virtues of the universe before I could see that Design Thinking involves using real-world tools and materials to excite the human spirit.

The exciting thing, of course, is how much excitement I get out of being a designer-magician. I may not be any good at it, but it certainly delights my soul and my spirit to be a creator of things, above and beyond what mystical benefits accrue to the present owner of this scroll of power.  And it’s another way to bring more diversity into the world, which I think is A-OK.

Via Flickr:
A friend of mine runs a shop, and has been experiencing some of the ups and downs of the current economy. We tried doing some magical work to keep her shop running a while ago, using the energies of Jupiter — bringer of generosity. The earlier work was some Jupiter sigils attached to a fountain; that worked surprisingly well. But, then the fountain broke; the parts to the fountain have been sitting in a back room of her shop for a while.

So, last Thursday I started this scroll of the Orphic Hymn to Jupiter. I finished it last night, and gave it to her this morning — charged with Jovian, Solar and Lunar energies. For my first major piece of “calligraphy” (with a Sharpie pen!), I think it turned out rather well. Jupiter’s face is a little off-balance and crazy, but on the whole it turned out pretty well.

I didn’t use the traditional “medieval” page-layout that I’ve been experimenting with for this particular page, but there is an underlying geometry behind it, particularly on the illumination in the lower-right. All in all, it obeys Henry Cornelius Agrippa’s model of the three-fold virtues.

Breaking Rules

18th mansion: drawn & inked
Originally uploaded by anselm23

One of the things that I’m learning about the rules for laying out the pages in my notebook according to medieval rules, is that there is sometimes benefit to breaking them — as I do here on the right-hand page, with the ogival/Gothic arch that contains the snake. This isn’t the best layout I’ve ever done, but it’s in part about learning to break the rules, even though I’m just learning them.

Talking with my friend Craig’s friend Allegra over the weekend, we got into talking about margins and fonts, and she pointed out that the standard computer word-processing margins of 1″ on all sides are pretty terrible. They’re ugly, but they’ve become the norm. The margins here are not necessarily perfect, by any means, but at the same time they’re interesting, in part because they deviate from the normal rules.

So… if I follow “medieval margins” rules, and break those rules, am I breaking our rules and inventing my own, or breaking their rules and leaning towards ours? Am I playing with conventions and norms? Am I making art according to my own rules?

How much of what we teach children these days are really hard-and-fast rules, and how much of what we teach are actually rules of thumb? How much of what we teach is determined by rules laid down by computer programmers and computers?

Time was when there were a range of such rules of thumb, and people had to learn all these rules of thumb by experimenting with drawing lines on blank paper or parchment…. and as I do these exercises, I wonder what we’ve lost by moving away from this kind of training?

Poem: Star Election of Cetus

I’m not a student of Christopher Warnock’s astrological magic course, but I am on his mailing list, and I do like the act of creating poetry and hymns around the astrological windows he and his students find.

Today there is such an opening for Menkar, the alpha star in the constellation of Cetus, associated with finding lost things, good luck, and happiness.

Menkar, bright star of heaven’s graceful whale,
adorning Cetus with fluorescent jaw!
Send out your fortunate rays without fail,
To bring joyous days under heaven’s law!
Deep Ocean knows the crested serpent’s route,
Mimicking heaven’s own dutiful stars;
Now in your breaching, send the lucky spout
Raining down on us to drive away cares!
Give us fresh eyes to find that which was lost,
Tumble knuckle bones to favor our deeds;
Steady our keel though we be tempest-tossed!
Opportune times come to him the whale leads:
Cetus and Menkar enliven my art;
Prosper this work with good luck from the start!

One cannot be an adept

 like a deep insightOriginally uploaded by anselm23

One of the things that keeping a daily journal entry is good for is generating occasional flashes of insight. These can then be used for the purposes of generating further Light, in the form of artwork and artistry and Arte.

Oscar Wilde once said, “I always takemy journal withmewhen I travel. One should always have something sensational to read on the train.”

Today, while practicing tai chi late in the day as part of my daily practice (having missed my morning window), I realized that as much progress as I’ve made in my practice, the radically different timeof day had thrown me for a real loop. It then became an opportunity for further exploration by the creation of this artwork as the background for the presentation of my own self-quotation.

Maybe there’s ego in this, but It doesn’t feel like that. It feels like a deep insight worthy of celebration, how deeply I am connected to the place and time in which I do my Work.

Via Flickr:
Made with Paper

… So I made it into a poster. Originally from a line in the entry “Taiji Day 257: Under Moonlight” on my blog, andrewbwatt.wordpress.com

“One cannot be an adept in the mornings, if one is still an apprentice in the darkness.”