Slowness
One of the pleasures of art is the suspension of TIME. You are engrossed in something, and before you know it, hours have gone by. It’s something that is lost in the digital age; we get instant gratification in all we want. But the greatest works of art, be it a sculpture or a cathedral, were created over what must seem to be glacial pace by today’s standards. What have we gained from all that speed?
Milan Kundera, in that ponderous novel, “Slowness”, equates slowness with memory. A man is walking briskly and suddenly slows down when he wants to remember something. And in an article written about their work, Billie Tsien lamented how pencils are slowly being phased out. She was also worried that pen ink was disappearing, so she began to hoard them. “Slowly,” she wrote, “the tools of the hand disappear.” The ‘tools of the hand’ she refers to is of course a slow craft. To draw is to observe you hand making a mark on the paper over time. The accumulation of marks forms an impression, and slowly a likeness appears, as if by magic. And if a mistake is made, it is the eraser’s turn to wipe the mark away, stroke by stroke. Through it all, the mind thinks and wills the hand to make permanent its fleeting vision. And after a while, you look up and the watch says you’ve passed your lunch time. Not surprisingly, work is done slowly, and there is not more than 1 piece of paper worked upon at any one time, as opposed to the multiple web-pages opened on the computer screen at any one time. I know this may sound a bit Luddite, a fear of Industrialisation, a plead for small cottage industries where the carpet is still loomed, the cloth weaved and the grains sickled. So this may be a symptom of my advancing years. The young students under my charge, weaned by MTV and schooled to last no longer than 45 minutes in any lecture, are blazers of computer power. They are the future. Many of them do not own a pencil, and if they do, it’s the mechanical type, not those you have to sharpen. When forced to draw, some will tentatively nib the paper, as if poking a dead rat, and nervously build a line out of a series of disconnected hairs. Surely to this generation, you would think, the pencil is as passé as a cuckoo-clock. Then how is it that when tutors sit with them, take out their pencils and begin to sketch, they become totally transfixed? Some has even mentioned that they would like to take drawing classes. Could the school conduct some lessons on hand drawing?
I believe what captivates them is not so much the fidelity of a drawing to reality, but the fact that here is a tutor from the old school who has REMEMBERED a visual image enough to replicate in on paper at will. They will suspect correctly that that memory has been acquired through slow observation and in many cases, sketching with the hand. Consider an image captured with the camera, and the image slowly seared into the consciousness through the etching of graphite on pulp; which will they remember longer?
For some of the trendier students, the link between hand and memory is closer to grasp than they think. I see it when they flash their newly painted nails across their drawings. As such times, I become the distracted admirer. It would have taken them at least an hour to get those exotic patterns onto the nails. They are the slow process of layering paint upon paint, and the patient wait for them to dry. Did it take an hour of their time? They hadn’t realized it, because they’d been too engrossed with the designs. They cannot imagine a machine ever taking over the role of a professional manicurist. Sigh. If only they would spend that time on their school designs instead.
This morning, we had a staff meeting and the 2 colleagues next to me took out their PDAs and began dotting the touch screens. I took out my moleskine and started writing. I’m not proud of my antiquity, but I remember what I write more than what I type. In tribute to those who share this short-coming, I have down-loaded some images from the website of moleskine which featured samples from their users’ pages. It’s from http://www.moleskineus.com/ and I hope they will not think I’ve infringed on any copyright. Moleskine users take their time to fill up its pages, bit by bit. I hope you’ll see why I’m crazy about them.
Chup
11 December 2006
One of the pleasures of art is the suspension of TIME. You are engrossed in something, and before you know it, hours have gone by. It’s something that is lost in the digital age; we get instant gratification in all we want. But the greatest works of art, be it a sculpture or a cathedral, were created over what must seem to be glacial pace by today’s standards. What have we gained from all that speed?
Milan Kundera, in that ponderous novel, “Slowness”, equates slowness with memory. A man is walking briskly and suddenly slows down when he wants to remember something. And in an article written about their work, Billie Tsien lamented how pencils are slowly being phased out. She was also worried that pen ink was disappearing, so she began to hoard them. “Slowly,” she wrote, “the tools of the hand disappear.” The ‘tools of the hand’ she refers to is of course a slow craft. To draw is to observe you hand making a mark on the paper over time. The accumulation of marks forms an impression, and slowly a likeness appears, as if by magic. And if a mistake is made, it is the eraser’s turn to wipe the mark away, stroke by stroke. Through it all, the mind thinks and wills the hand to make permanent its fleeting vision. And after a while, you look up and the watch says you’ve passed your lunch time. Not surprisingly, work is done slowly, and there is not more than 1 piece of paper worked upon at any one time, as opposed to the multiple web-pages opened on the computer screen at any one time. I know this may sound a bit Luddite, a fear of Industrialisation, a plead for small cottage industries where the carpet is still loomed, the cloth weaved and the grains sickled. So this may be a symptom of my advancing years. The young students under my charge, weaned by MTV and schooled to last no longer than 45 minutes in any lecture, are blazers of computer power. They are the future. Many of them do not own a pencil, and if they do, it’s the mechanical type, not those you have to sharpen. When forced to draw, some will tentatively nib the paper, as if poking a dead rat, and nervously build a line out of a series of disconnected hairs. Surely to this generation, you would think, the pencil is as passé as a cuckoo-clock. Then how is it that when tutors sit with them, take out their pencils and begin to sketch, they become totally transfixed? Some has even mentioned that they would like to take drawing classes. Could the school conduct some lessons on hand drawing?
I believe what captivates them is not so much the fidelity of a drawing to reality, but the fact that here is a tutor from the old school who has REMEMBERED a visual image enough to replicate in on paper at will. They will suspect correctly that that memory has been acquired through slow observation and in many cases, sketching with the hand. Consider an image captured with the camera, and the image slowly seared into the consciousness through the etching of graphite on pulp; which will they remember longer?
For some of the trendier students, the link between hand and memory is closer to grasp than they think. I see it when they flash their newly painted nails across their drawings. As such times, I become the distracted admirer. It would have taken them at least an hour to get those exotic patterns onto the nails. They are the slow process of layering paint upon paint, and the patient wait for them to dry. Did it take an hour of their time? They hadn’t realized it, because they’d been too engrossed with the designs. They cannot imagine a machine ever taking over the role of a professional manicurist. Sigh. If only they would spend that time on their school designs instead.
This morning, we had a staff meeting and the 2 colleagues next to me took out their PDAs and began dotting the touch screens. I took out my moleskine and started writing. I’m not proud of my antiquity, but I remember what I write more than what I type. In tribute to those who share this short-coming, I have down-loaded some images from the website of moleskine which featured samples from their users’ pages. It’s from http://www.moleskineus.com/ and I hope they will not think I’ve infringed on any copyright. Moleskine users take their time to fill up its pages, bit by bit. I hope you’ll see why I’m crazy about them.
Chup
11 December 2006
posted by chuplin @ 12/12/2006 09:41:00 AM
3 Comments:
Cheh... for a moment I thought its your own sketches! You should put up some of your own drawings and writings too la
...the other half
Thanks to the link, now I HAVE to have the daily planner :(. I agree with you. With electronics abound, I find hand-written diaries and hand-drawings so unique and classy. I wish I could draw :D.
I sounded like a moleskine salesman, right? I should ask for commission.
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