{D} 141: What did you learn about yourself today?

What happened when I started drawing again after 30 years

Recently I started drawing again. I haven’t drawn since the 80s. Mostly comics back then, in the 80s, that’s what I would draw.

I was a big Marvel head, so lotta Rob Liefeld, lotta Jim Lee, lotta Alan Davis. I would spend hours drawing strong chins, over-developed shoulders, muscled abs, and gleaming white teeth.

This was the 80s, the decade of the dark anti-hero. Batman grew old, Supergirl died, Wolverine was incinerated. To a tweenager, this was vErY cOoL. There was just something about Days of Futures Past, just as there was something about Scourge of the Underworld, just as there was something about The Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns. These are all stories where somebody—lots of bodies tbh—dies. Magnum P.I. and Love Boat swaddled you in pleasing fictions, but of The Watchmen, Alan Moore said, and famously—this was the moment that the audience grew up.

And me, I was a jaded kid of divorce who was certain adults were full of shit, and the comics of the time were there to tell me, panel by panel, to expect the worst (you won’t be disappointed!). So I read a lot of comics and I drew a lot of superheroes. I had sketchpads filled with superheroes laying all over the house.

And then I stopped. I stopped reading comics and stopped drawing superheroes, both. Can’t remember when exactly. Probably about the time I went to high school.

I stopped reading comics because I wanted to be cool. I stopped drawing because I was afraid I wasn’t any good.

Those are both the same reason.

Too interested in the result, not enough in the process

Oh right, I remember why I stopped drawing.

I stopped drawing because I had become more interested in what other kids thought of my drawings than I was interested in actually getting better at drawing.

I wanted them to think I was a good artist, more than I wanted to take the time to actually be a good artist. I wanted the result without the effort. I couldn’t separate in my mind the desire to draw a thing, with the desire to be loved for having drawn the thing.

For the last thirty years, whenever the topic of drawing or illustration would come up, I would always think to myself, yeah I can draw. But I never went back to it. I never practiced. Over the decades, the memory of my ability—of how it felt to draw—dwindled smaller and smaller. Kinda like a flickering light, like a buzz zapper light. Just a spark and a zzt! now and then, out there in the dark backyard of my brain.

This is the way of all talents left untended—writing, drawing, language, whatever. It’s all the same. After college, I worked on a farm in Italy for about three months. I learned some Italian, enough to get around. Workers on the farm would be like wow man, you’re really picking it up fast. I was super proud of that. But after three months I left, went back to Virginia, got a job at a tech company next to a cow pasture, and never spoke Italian again. Never had another conversation. But for years, maybe a decade, whenever the opportunity would arise in conversation, I would always say yeah, I can speak a little Italian.

But I couldn’t, not really.

I wanted the person I was speaking with to be impressed that I knew Italian, without me having gone through, y’know, the effort to improve my Italian.

And that’s what drawing felt like, too.

When you learn to do a thing, when you enjoy doing that thing, when doing that thing brings joy … and then you consciously choose not to do the thing … well, now you’ve performed an alchemist’s trick on yourself, haven’t you.

You’ve transmuted joy into shame.

I drew this about six weeks after starting to draw again

Back in February I started reading The Artist’s Way.

This is not a recommendation to read the book! God this is going to sound like a recommendation for the book, but it’s not, I’m just explaining what happened.

For the uninitiated, The Artist’s Way is a self-help book from 1992. Super popular. Very spiritual. Talks about god and letting god in and god loving you, all as a means to unlock your creativity. That entire positioning is just very much not my style. It was especially not my style in 1992, when my god was Alan Davis and the snikt snikt of Wolverine’s claws.

But life happens, people change, people get middle-aged etc. I wasn’t working too much and needed something to fill my head and my time, besides anxiety. So I figured I’d do a George Costanza. I’d do the opposite of all of my natural inclinations, and so I read the book.

And again, this is in no way a recommendation that you read the book! But I do need to explain some things about it, e.g., that it’s structured in the form of a 12-week course. Every week you’re asked to do certain tasks, like write morning pages and take yourself on artist dates. Morning pages mean you write three pages nonstop (or in my case, twenty minutes typing). Art dates are you go on a date with yourself to do something artsy that you love. The whole schpiel is, you’re intended to rediscover the artist within by giving yourself up to god’s divine inspiration and realizing that yes, you’re an artist.

Again, I am concerned to make sure you understand: the god portion of this is not my thing! I am also concerned to make sure you understand that I don’t care if the god portion is your thing. But the message of acceptance and embracing a universal creative flow—the things beneath all the god wrapping paper—those are the emotional magic tricks that I paid to see. How the magician’s assistant escapes from the box? Always less interesting than the fact that you didn’t notice it happening at all.

Less than a week after beginning the book, I started drawing again.

The first thing I drew was a building. I was suddenly obsessed with a crumbling art deco building a few blocks from my apartment. I went there every day, from 2-4pm, sat outside on the sidewalk, and drew. Tbh I felt like Richard Dreyfuss in Close Encounters, molding mashed potatoes into the shape of a butte in my living room.

And then for my first art date I went to see The Brutalist, which was a rather earnest and twee thing to do, granted, but look buddy, that was the week it premiered here in Mexico, ok? And then for my second art date I went to a figure drawing class. And I’ve been going to the figure drawing class ever since.

One of the benefits of doing a thing is just doing the thing.

Feels good, feels different in your muscles, in your bones, feels like the blood is flowing faster or slower or into different places in your fingers, ribs, toes. That’s a very yoga feeling. Just breathe and be at home in yourself and feel how home feels. A big benefit of drawing has been, for me, just doing the thing and feeling how the thing feels.

Another benefit of doing a thing is how doing that thing makes you feel about other things.

You can’t, after all, describe one experience without comparing it to another. Can’t be hot without knowing cold, can’t be lonely without the idea of friends, can’t have an orgasm without dying a little bit, or so the French say.

Our brains and our bodies continually make these comparisons in an effort to make sense of the new and the unknown in terms of the old and the known. Which is why some very accomplished people think the root of cognition is analogies: thing is other thing. So when we take a moment and ask ourselves how do I feel, a lot of the time the answer comes back well, I feel like this other thing I once felt.

When I started drawing again, mostly I started having feelings about my childhood. Little memories would burble up. Good memories! Going to art class on Saturdays in a run-down apartment building in Shockoe Slip. Spending hours on the shag carpet in front of the TV while Rescue Rangers and Thundercats were on, 2-4pm Monday through Friday, learning to draw profiles, and feet, and lips, and chins.

Using the drawing muscle made my brain and body remember things it hadn’t thought about in decades.

One of the other feelings it brought up was fear. My parents got divorced when I was two years old. I went to a Catholic school where divorce was a sin and all the other kids had married parents and station wagons. The only thing that made me feel different was, well, I could draw a little bit. But man, was I ever terrified that someone else could draw better than me.

Terrified that if other people were better than me then, well, shit—how was I special?

The way you do one thing is the way you do everything, etc.

The other day I was watching a video on YouTube about figure drawing: 99% of drawing students fall into this trap. You won’t after this.¹

In the vid the artist Kenzo (I super recommend his community, Love Life Drawing) explains that beginning students, when trying to capture a figure, tend to draw in one of two ways:

• too “expressively”, with gestural circles and dashed off lines and just feelin’ it with a great deal of frenetic energy, “passion etc blah blah blah”

• or too timidly, forcing every line to be perfect with the sole intention of avoiding mistakes and looking silly

Both of these styles are mindless.

Draw too expressively and you communicate passion without form.

Draw too timidly and you communicate form without passion.

Either way you’re not making creative decisions about what you’ve observed. You’re either madly dashing (in the hopes that something will emerge) or slowly limping (in the hopes you’ll exactly replicate what you see).

That lesson makes a lot of sense to me.

Because I make the same mistake, and I do it both when I’m drawing and when I’m writing.

Sometimes when I’m drawing a figure I’ll focus on a specific shape, e.g. the head and the neck, at the expense of the rest of the body. I’ll spend ten, fifteen, twenty minutes getting everything about the head and neck exactly right. Shape, shadows, position of the eyes, all that. And then, once I’m satisfied it’s in good shape, I’ll move on to the rest of body … only to realize the proportions are off, or the head is in the wrong position. But by that point, I’m so invested in what I’ve drawn for the head and neck that I don’t want to change it. Changing it would take time. So I force the rest of the body to conform. Which, of course, changes the whole composition.

I fall into the same exact trap when I write essays. I’ll get invested in a single paragraph, say the opening paragraph, and I’ll massage that thing to death. I’ll polish it to a nice shine. I’ll get every word perfect and exactly where I want it.

And then, when I’m finally ready to move on, I discover I have no earthly idea what to do next. I haven’t made an outline. I haven’t thought through my entire argument. I’m sure there’s an argument there, waiting to be conjured—just like I’m sure, when I’m drawing a figure, that there’s a body waiting to be drawn beneath the head—but now, after spending thirty minutes on a single paragraph, I have to spend even more time figuring out how to Frankenstein it onto the rest of the essay. (this is exactly what happened recently, by the way, when I was writing about the architecture of Mexico City).

In grade school, you’re taught to create outlines before you write. Me, in my better moments, I use bullet points to capture my whole argument, then I go back in and flesh out the line on each bullet. John McPhee, who is slightly more qualified to tender advice, famously uses notecards to establish the structure and scenes of his essays. These are just ways of making sure you develop your arguments proportionally.

You know, like a figure drawing.

There’s a reason they call the parts of an essay the headline, the body, the kicker.

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Anyway if you’re not learning, what’s the point?

I wasn’t gonna mention AI in this letter but here we are, so fuck it.

It has not escaped my notice that I’ve become focused on writing and drawing, both, at a time when AIs—if you believe the headlines—are replacing both of those things.

Maybe they are. Probably they are. The Fantasia brooms are coming, sweeping up all the mickeys and mice. And the central question of certain technologists seems to be, essentially, how can we be less human. How can we ameliorate this ugly, awful, no good and fetid human condition by using AI to do the squishy emotional unscalabale things formerly reserved for bones and butts bipeds—e.g., illustration, e.g. therapy, e.g., writing birthday cards, whatever.

Which doesn’t make good sense! Not from the POV of being a good human alongside other humans. It’s sort of like trying to be a better dancer by breaking your dance partner’s legs. It’s sorta like trying to be a better dancer by not dancing at all.

Which is why I still love writing. Which is why I still love drawing. Which is why I believe that practicing writing and drawing is beneficial to me regardless and in spite of whether some computers, somewhere, can do both better than I can. Because practicing writing and drawing helps me to grow and understand myself, which helps me be more empathetic with others, which I would like to think helps us, in some small way, to all live together on this great giggling globe we call Earth. Art is emotional skin in the game.

There is a famous phrase used by logicians and hack strategists and LinkedIn losers that is applicable here: the map is not the territory. It means, basically, that the abstraction is not the thing itself—the social media account is not the person, the results of the personality test are not the personality, the menu is not the meal. It’s a reminder that all models are wrong, even though sometimes they’re useful.

And look AI is useful. There are 1 billion essays approx about how useful it is (including mine). But my biggest gripe with relying on AI to do something creative—and here I mean, like, literally writing an essay for you, or doing your homework for you, or drawing something for you—is that you’re accepting the map as the territory. You are no longer modeling the world yourself, but relying on the model of a model of a model. You are abstracting yourself, by degrees, away from the lived experience of interrogating the world. Which, btw, is a process of learning about yourself as much as it is about the world.

When you make art you realize, and joyfully, that the map you’re making is not territory.

Of course it’s not.

The map is you.

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Delightful is a 100% organic, free-range, desktop-to-inbox newsletter with links and things, usually. Your host is Steve Bryant, friendly neighborhood insights and content strategist. Let’s work together or go on a hike or something. steve@thisisdelightful.com

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{ 🔒 archive }

Creativity, language, stuff like that

• 26 things I've learned while learning a language
  Notes from someone who’s working at it

• How to write
  On moving and watching and paying attention

• Curiosity and Research 101
  On finding out about things

• A map of what you meant to say
  On the 3D space of language

• The A.I. isn't a moron. She's your wife.
  On making ads with AI

Brand strategy, content strategy, etc

• Observational and Culture Study Cheat Sheet
  A template and tools for researching people and communities

• My content strategy toolkit
  14 tools for organizing, measuring, and creating content

• My concept diagram template
  A Figjam for diagramming the complex relationships between concepts

• Product Content Strategy 101
  For anybody who’s creating a product that requires editorial content

• The Bento Box Method for developing topical content
  A cute and useful way to structure your content topics

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Thanks for reading. Be seeing you.

“For what are we born if not to aid one another? And to listen and say nothing is a cold enough aid.”

—Pilar, in For Whom the Bell Tolls

1. On YouTube you have to wade through mountains of slop—just egregious heaping and stinking piles of pixelated excrement and reaction face fuckery and clickbaity titles—just to find a lesson that speaks to you.

Fact, the whole experience of being sold video on youtube is so rat-fuckingly gimmick-based that I contend it is not unlike the experience of leafing through those terrible ads in the back of comic books in the 80s. Prizes! Cash! Dead! Your soul!

And I get why the titles are this way, I really do, I was a marketer for an unfortunate number of years, I understand the incentives and pressures at play—it’s just that I would prefer a video browsing experience that didn’t feel like Dave Chappelle’s Mall of the Internet.