This! This, people, is the point. This exercise is what I am all about right now—the connection between really spending time remembering what something looks like and then reacting to the thing something is in your memory. This is the space between the half-hour and the five-seconds, and exploring that space is the greatest obsession.
I’ll rail on about Lynda Barry to all comers—artists, writers, programmers, and business folk alike. Go read her books and see what I mean.
The Near-Sighted Monkey teaches a picture-making class once a week in Madison, Wisconsin. All of the work is done in a standard composition notebook with white glue and paper scraps and Flair pens. Tonight the class did a barely modified exercise from a book by Ivan Brunetti called “Cartooning: Philosophy and Practice.”
THEY DUG IT!!!! WHY NOT GET IVAN BRUNETTI’S BOOK AND TRY IT???!!!
In your composition notebook, turn to a blank page and then….
1. Draw a car for exactly three minutes. Keep your pen moving the whole time. The quality of the drawing doesn’t matter as much as adding all of the details of a car you can remember. (door locks! Side mirrors! Tail-pipe!) Don’t let your pen stop for the whole three minutes. Have someone time you.
Now….2. Draw the car in two minutes
Then,
3. One minute
4. 30 seconds
5. Five seconds.
Etc.
Ivan Brunetti says to repeat the exercise with cats, castles, telephones— (Really, any noun you can think of )—-and to really notice how when you don’t have enough time to freak out, a certain kind of spontaneous gesture appears.
