Tag: art

Blind drawing

Posted on by philipdodson

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Today I attended a workshop run by my mate Doug and it was themed around exploring art and sound.

It was focused on how noise and sounds might impact our productivity and work and exploring that using art.

A fascinating few hours and some really interesting thoughts and insights were shared.

One of the exercises that Doug set was to draw blind, quite literally covering our eyes and then drawing.

This to me was an exciting and liberating exercise. It brings uncertainty.

The thing is if you do different things, change some of the environment and take away something such as sight that we take for granted, we can actually take away some of the barriers and use others skills that perhaps are idle when we rely on for example our sight.

I am not suggesting that we always wear a blindfold, especially a bad idea for driving, but occasionally it is refreshing to challenge ourselves in ways that take us out of our comfort zone and allow other skills to be used, to see what we are capable of in challenging situations.

It also helps realise that if we can draw blind, then perhaps we are allowing other excuses to hold back our progress.

Take a sheet of paper, a pencil,cover your eyes and give it a go.

Craft

Posted on by philipdodson

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100’s of years ago before the mechanisation that the industrialised world brought to the human race, we were involved in work, art, music, or writing that involved craft.

We wrote letters with a quill dipped in ink on a scroll. We spent our time crafting beautiful letters.

We shaped wood into amazing things, we hammered iron into all manner of items, we made and created things with our hands, often made with joy and intimate knowledge and skill of how to.

Whatever we did it mainly involved concentration and often deep work with passion and feeling. It had a meaning.

In our world of email, social media, and instant gratification, we are desperately short of doing anything of meaning, substance and passion.

In order to fulfil ourselves and gain meaning to our existence, we need to add craft to whatever we are doing.

That requires attention and the removal of distraction. It needs us to learn focus and forget the shallow pings of the insubstantial world we have created.

Craft something remarkable and enjoy every moment.

There is a brilliant quote ‘we who cut mere stones must always be envisioning cathedrals’. We must envision something deeper rather than simply be adding yet another piece of digital content to the vast digital dustbin of much of the internet.

There is more.