Mbira

This is a somewhat abstracted sketch of an African instrument called an Mbira. It's one of my favorite drawings. I particularly like the composition and the asymmetry of the "buttons" on the bottom. (In reality, they are bottle caps nailed on to the instrument to add a percussive quality to the finger-piano sound.) This was done on the same day as the cello.
You can see the instrument as it appears in the Boston MFA collection here. As you can see, the composition was the instrument-maker's, not mine.
I find that others are frequently indifferent to this drawing, and yet I've returned to it for inspiration several times, and I find myself repeating that pattern of buttons unconsciously, often echoing it with the arrangement of nine objects in a composition in another medium and with other objects.

PS: Listen to the sound of this on the MFA site. The piece they have, played on this instrument, has a repetitive quality that reminds me of the repetitive quality that this drawing has had for me. I love when themes are echoed and repeated with improvisation, whether in art, music or life.

Plate of Shrimp

Ah, yes, another hydrant. One of the earliest ones. Just a pencil sketch of the hydrant you can see from the porch at the summer place. The same one as in that painting I posted a while back. And about a month back, while walking to the train, I came across this:

I grabbed my little traveling camera from my bag and took a couple shots. A worker came running up to me, telling me it was nothing interesting, they had shut off the water. I tried to tell him it was interesting to me, but finally just said "It looks cool." He gave me every indication that he thought I was a kook without actually speaking and walked away. Then I got this shot:

Fans of Repo Man will recall the plate of shrimp phenomenon. And really, this whole post was just to bring up Repo Man, which I loved but probably haven't seen since the 80s. I think I'll add it to my netflix queue.

This is not a great drawing...

and yet I find it pleasing on quick glance. Why is that? It's a sketch from a set of quilt design ideas in one of my sketchbooks, and looking through them I was struck by this one.
When sketching, I thought about the strip quilt process -- sort of a loose log cabin, where the quilt is built up by strip sections rather than carefully measured squares -- and built up the drawing similarly.
There's no golden ratio or nice spiral here, and yet the proportions seem right. How do we judge that, internally? What... oh wait. Maybe there is a spiral shape - but it's in the shapes darkened, rather than the large-blocks-to-smaller-blocks that were the "spiral" of how I built up the drawing. So I somehow imposed a spiral after the initial drawing was laid out without really thinking about it. Cool.
(It also looks a little bit like Cape Cod, but the red shape at the top right would have to curve or be cut down a bit - Provincetown doesn't go that far into Cape Cod Bay!)
If I think too much about all this when sketching, the sketches turn out like engineering drawings. Neat, but without life. It's almost as if the aesthetic pleasure is diminished if the rules are adhered to too closely.
I wonder if that's measurable. Could an experiment be devised where subjects are asked to evaluate the pleasingness of a set of abstract shapes generated by computer to conform to strict proportional rules vs similar shapes that break those rules by some degree?

Auto Show

The summer season is upon us again... this will be the view from The Porch for the next 3 months.

A note about canola oil...

This is what happens when you ask a [literal] engineer who is also an [expressive] artist to leave you a note about canola oil. (Yeah, corny joke.)

Sketchbook Numbers Quilt

Maybe it's time for open source fonts. After I typed that, I remembered "google first" (today's RTFM) and realized of course there's a lot of thought around that, and in exactly the direction I was thinking. More variety of fonts available more widely for web design.

Of course, even after solving the problem of ensuring the font you want is on all systems (even microsoft), ya gotta ask: Do we really want more fonts available? Aren't most websites ugly enough?

I have a long-held prejudice against a layout containing more than maybe two typefaces. When I was in gradeschool, I'd often stop after school at our small town weekly, where my mother might be laying out the paper. She'd be standing at the layout table, holding her "scalpel" (exacto-knife), moving articles and ads around with a very literal cut-and-paste technique. She'd grumble about some of the pre-designed ads that would come in which were "messy" - too many words, too many typefaces, too crowded, too ugly.

I'd listen to her while copying letterforms out of a linotype typeface catalog with a blue mark-up pencil.

She made me love simple designs with well-chosen typefaces.