Category: Art

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How Do You Calculate The Area Of A Country?

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Saturday, 8.01pm

Sheffield, U.K.

Life isn’t black and white. It’s a million gray areas, don’t you find? – Ridley Scott

In Boris Jardine’s paper “State of the field: Paper tools” the author tells a story about Edmund Halley, the guy that found the comet, who was asked by John Houghton to figure out the area of England and Wales.

That’s actually quite hard to do, when you think about it. Most of us can work out the area of a circle or a rectangle, but how to you work out an irregular shape like the outline of a map?

It’s also quite an important question because the areas of places have implications for what can happen there – what kind of industry might arise, how many people can live there, and what sort of taxes you can raise.

The technique Halley used was one that is a little unexpected, although it was well known in the 1600s, called “cut and weigh”.

Halley selected a map that he felt was a good representation of the country and cut it out. Then he cut circles from the same paper as the map until the cut out map and a circle weighed the same. Now, he could work out the area of the circle and based on the scale of the map calculate the area of England and Wales. He came up with the number 38.7 million acres, which is not far off the modern number of 37.3 million acres.

We think of paper as just a place to hold ink, but it turns out it can do more than that, and sometimes its weight matters more than you might think.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

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Are We Living Through A Forgotten Century?

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Friday, 7.58pm

Sheffield, U.K.

There are only two lasting bequests we can hope to give our children. One of these is roots, the other, wings. – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

I have been thinking about how digital content is so easy to make and also so easy to forget about. If you keep a journal in digital form, for example, it weighs nothing, takes up no space. It’s simply a file in a space somewhere and it’s easy to forget it exists. And if you forget it then it’s as good as gone. And it will really be gone when the last hard drive has been thrown out and the webserver deletes your pages.

I read somewhere, or heard a news report, that there are moments of the history of this new century that are hard to find, that may have been lost. They were recorded on media that is old and obsolete, that has been overwritten or deleted or corrupted.

In 2015 I remember writing a sentence that said something like “If it’s not online it doesn’t exist.” It was an alternative to a thought I’d held for a long time before that which was “If it’s not written down, it doesn’t exist”. I wrote that first sentence down, took a picture of it and used it in a blog post. On a website that I can’t remember creating. In a folder I will struggle to find.

I am beginning to think I was wrong. Not about writing things down but about the online part – about the digital part – because unlimited space creates its own problems, not the least of which is why we need so much.

Here’s the thing. If you own a digital camera or a phone you’ve probably taken thousands of pictures over the last ten years. Many of us are too busy to do anything with that material – one day we’ll sort it out we think. But sorting takes time – organising stuff takes time. So we put it off. But if we put it off for long enough it’s like having no record at all – there is a gap in your history, one that used to be filled with photo albums and diaries, but now it’s gone. The abundance of the digital age threatens an unexpectedly dark age, one where there is no material to look at.

Social media companies exist to harvest your attention. They are starting to realise that your feed, the scrolling list of things that you look at, is insufficient to keep your attention. I heard a segment on the news recently that said their plan is to make their platforms more engaging, more interactive, more ephemeral, more like the real world. This is a “metaverse” a world with which you have to interact like you do with the real world. Where you have to pay attention when something is front of you or it will vanish, never to be seen again. Like a sunset. If you don’t see a sunset when it happens you won’t see the same one again.

What we end up with, then, is a world where we interact with everything but we don’t pay attention. It doesn’t matter whether the world is real or virtual, it’s experienced but not… seen.

To understand the difference you have to think like a photographer. I grew up with a film camera, one with 36 shots, and you had to pay attention to what was in front of you to try and get a good picture. These days you take 200, review them instantly and think you’ve got it. But that’s just looking, not seeing.

I think I’m falling out of love with digital – perhaps because I’m a digital immigrant rather than a digital native. Paper exists in a way a text file does not. There are innumerable advantages to having digital tools – but they should complement rather than replace one’s photos and notebooks.

And my plan is to tilt the scales, get the balance back towards the analog and see what’s really happening around me.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

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How To Think About Content Using Paper Tools

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Thursday, 10.15pm

Sheffield, U.K.

We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us. – Marshall McLuhan

I’ve been wandering down a path looking at how scientists, writers and artists used their notebooks – in what we might call their workshop – and the nature of the marks they made. In doing that I came across the idea of “paper tools”, a methodological concept introduced by Ursula Klein in a few papers.

The term caught my eye – “paper tools” – a nice term for something that we’re all familiar with even if we don’t really think about it much. Bargheer (2001) goes into one specific tool in more detail, the 2×2 table, and shows how it became a popular tool in the first half of the last century among sociologists.

As is often the case the outdated tools of yesterday’s research are used by businesses and consultancies today as the latest thing they’ve learned. But while there are better approaches now the 2×2 table is still powerful because it lets you analyse pairs of concepts in a rough but useful way.

Take, for example, a problem I have been facing with writing content for this blog. As I read academic research it gets harder to find ideas that I can write about quickly. Some of the concepts I’m coming across need time to work through and understand before one can write about them with any authority. At the same time it would be nice to keep going with the blog as I carry on towards my goal of getting a million words out as I try and learn how to write better.

This is a good problem to analyse using a 2×2 table – looking at the length of content vs the content of content. You can write stuff that’s long or short or you can write stuff that’s deep or shallow.

When you put this information into a 2×2 table it helps you make sense of your options. For example, most of the stuff that comes up on your feed is short content that’s shallow – it’s click bait that delivers nothing of value. At the same time you get long content that’s just as shallow – usually a tired sales pitch that thinks that long form content selling some rubbish is going to work on you. All this does is waste your time.

On the other hand you can have short content that is insightful – something that you can take away and use immediately. A tip, a hack, a method. I saw one recently on how to draw gears – a useful trick for a visual thinker. You could argue that this is the kind of material Seth Godin puts out, writing short content every day but aiming to make it punchy and insightful.

At the other extreme you have long form content that is genuinely useful – Tim Urban’s blog comes to mind here. Perhaps a few others.

So there are two takeaways here – the first is the use of the 2×2 table as a paper tool that helps you think about key features or elements of a situation. There is real power there. And then there is the bit about content types.

For me, I think it would be nice if the material in this blog was short enough to read but good enough to be insightful. There is little point in writing shallow material. The long form work, however, needs to make its way into papers and books.

I’ll aim for fewer words next time, then.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

References

Bargheer, S (2021), “Paper tools and the sociological imagination: How the 2×2 table shaped the work of Mills, Lazarsfeld and Parsons”, The American Sociologist, Vol 52, pp 254-275.

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Drawing The Contours Of An Object Without Looking At The Paper

Friday, 6.41pm

Sheffield, U.K.

Seeing much, suffering much, and studying much, are the three pillars of learning. – Benjamin Disraeli

Betty Edwards, in her famous book, Drawing on the right side of the brain introduces the idea of “Pure Contour Drawing”, based on Kimon Nicolaides’ 1941 book The natural way to draw.

The method is simple. Look at an object and let your eyes slowly follow an edge. As you do so draw the line your eyes are tracing with your pen or pencil, moving it at the same speed at which your eyes are moving. Do this very slowly – like your eyes and your hands are connected – the latter moves only when the former does and exactly the same amount.

Edwards writes about how this is an intensely hard thing to do. You will be tempted to look at the paper. You will want to move slower or faster. But you have to resist, you have to set a time and then slow down into the exercise. Eventually time will fade away and there will just be the movement of your eyes and your pen. That’s why you need the timer – to tell you when to emerge again.

This exercise is not going to result in a good looking picture. You’ll be lucky if you or anyone else can recognize it, as you can see in the video above. So why would you do this?

The reason is because most of us draw what we think we see rather than what we actually see. If I asked you to draw a maple leaf you could draw one from memory. If you drew one from a picture you would probably draw the lines quickly, relying on your memory of what the lines should be. We are not trained to see what’s actually there, whether there is a nick in the leaf, whether the join between segments of the leaf is triangular or an odd elongated nipple shape.

A pure contour drawing takes away your ability to just draw what you think you see. Instead, by slowing down, and following each edge you really see what’s there. And as your pen traces the movement of your eyes you draw what is really there. Artists develop this ability with practice over time but for the rest of us it’s a disorienting practice and we wonder what’s the point.

Most of the time we go through life relying on shortcuts – and that’s fine – we can’t pay attention to everything. But sometimes we should slow down and really look at what’s in front of us. What your child really looks like, for example, rather than the picture you carry around in your mind. Because that moment exists for a moment and then that child is a moment older and you can never see that moment ever again the way it was.

One day, perhaps you’ll be glad you paid attention to the things that mattered.

Cheers, Karthik Suresh

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Shelley’s Notebooks And Why You Should Keep Your Pen Moving

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It’s been such a deep and amazing journey for me, getting close to John Keats, and also I love Shelley and Byron. I mean, the thing about the Romantic poets is that they’ve got the epitaph of romantic posthumously. They all died really young, and Keats, the youngest of them all. – Jane Campion

Percy Bysshe Shelly (1792-1822) was an English Romantic poet, part of a group of poets that came up with an innovative way of writing poetry that distilled emotion from reflecting how humans lived their lives. It came out of thought, out of a serious contemplation of lived experience poured into poetry to capture meaning.

In Allen (2021) we learn that a poet’s notebook is their workshop. When we look at these notebooks we are tempted to focus on the words, the text – because that’s what makes its way into print and a book of poetry. But in the poet’s workshop, in Shelley’s books we can see the sawdust and cutouts – doodles and sketches and scribbles that surround and intersperse the words that sometimes make their way into print.

These drawings and marks are not childish or simple – they are a way for someone that is thinking hard to keep their hand moving, “keep the ink flowing” as the head works out what it’s trying to say or do or write. The movement helps with the thinking because being still is hard, focusing on just one thing is difficult and maybe it’s easier to focus when you have something else to distract you.

Then again, when it’s hard to see something, to think your way to it, it’s useful to do something else, to have a distraction – to walk, to read or to draw. You do something simple in the foreground while your mind works away in the background and when it’s ready it lets you know what its found.

Sometimes a doodle is just a doodle – it doesn’t mean anything, but it acts as a bridge from one state of thinking to another. But it’s also tempting to pour meaning into it, see an image as suggesting something more than the thing it shows you. Is that picture at the top copied from the Bodelian Shelley Manuscripts a boat and boatman or is it the grim reaper heading towards a fallen soul and does it mean more or less than what you see on the page?

Drawings in notebooks can be surreal – they are not made to be looked at but made in the process of making something else and perhaps they just fill the time between one thing and another. Or they are glimpses into the state of the mind that has created the work, perhaps it shows you the mess in their mind that resulted in the poetry you love.

You can read too much into the marks on a page. The one thing that is certain, however, is that you cannot make your art without making marks. If you’re stuck, then, just keep your pen moving, draw something, anything, until you’re free again.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

References

Allen, G (2021), “Shelley as visual artist: Doodles, sketches, ink blots and the critical reception of the visual”, /Studies in Romanticism”, Vol 60, No 3, pp 277-306

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How Picasso Cuts Through The Clutter

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Tuesday, 7.04pm

Sheffield, U.K.

I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them. – Pablo Picasso

In my last post I decided to explore the work of people who use drawing as a part of their process.

I recently read Deep Work by Cal Newport and 21 lessons for the 21st Century by Yuval Noah Harari and they both suggest that you stop looking on the web for information. That’s slightly ironic, as you’re reading this online, but their basic argument is that searching for information will present you with that which is popular. That, fortunately, is not a condition this blog suffers from. They suggest that instead of googling we should go and read peer-reviewed papers.

And that’s what I intend to do for these posts.

A good place to start, as good as any other anyway, is with the work of Pablo Picasso. Picasso said that it took him “four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.” He was trained in a formal academic style by his father but went on to create a number of new styles.

What is the essence of a thing – what can you reduce it to as you look at it and try to make sense of it? Picasso had a history with poultry – one story says that his father retired from drawing when he saw how well the young Picasso drew a pigeon’s feet. Spiller (2012) writes that “He didn’t just recreate, he stripped, lacerated, and re-presented.”

Take the images above, for example. These are birds drawn with a single line, reduced to their essentials. They are still recognizably birds, arguably even chickens – but it’s this idea that what you see comes down to a few lines, as few as you can, perhaps even just one line – which captures the essence of what’s in front of you.

Picasso’s work is supported by work in brain science – the line – the contour – is the at the heart of vision. We can recognize expressions with very few lines – just the elements that move on the face. It takes just a few lines to transform a scribble into a recognizable form. Sometimes there is so much out there that we need to start by reducing what we see to the essentials – to a single line that has all that is important in that situation.

So, the first lesson from Picasso is to ask yourself whether you can set down what you see in a single line, without lifting your pen from the paper.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

References

Spiller, H (2012), “Cock-A-Doodle”, Gastronomica, Vol 12, No 1, pp 9-11.

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What Does The Road Not Taken Look Like?

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Tuesday, 8.25pm

Sheffield, U.K.

To know what people really think, pay regard to what they do, rather than what they say. – George Santayana

The real world is a difficult place. I think we forget that when we spend most of our time in digital spaces and imaginary worlds. In those places everything is reversible – you have a delete key and an undo button and anything that is wrong goes away and anything that is left is right.

Except, it often isn’t. It’s left all right but that doesn’t mean it’s good or complete or finished or useful. It just is – digitally perfect and devoid of reality.

But of course that’s not fair. The artifact is the responsibility of the creator and if someone pushes something imperfect into the world then that’s their decision and if it’s any good then it might survive and if it’s not then it will be forgotten. And that’s ok because that’s how things should be.

I might have written about this before but I might as well remind myself what I think. I’ve been reading the odd bit of material where someone self-promotes their stuff, trying to big it up, place it in a higher context and claim that it is the apex of a particular kind of knowledge. It’s not and that gets pointed out by the kind of people who feel like they have to point out stuff that they think is wrong. And, of course, they do this on social media.

So, I ask you, does it matter what people on social media think about what you do? Should you engage, respond, get angry or be happy if someone likes your stuff and says nice things or hates your stuff and says bad things. Does opinion matter?

Well, it does to most of us because ego is a fragile thing and we like to be liked and we don’t like it when people have a go at stuff that we create. But here’s the thing. Once you’ve created something and put it out there, into the wild, whether it survives or not is now up to it and its environment. Take the self-promotional thing I was talking about earlier. In this case it’s a model of a particular kind of thinking. If it’s any good then people will try it, and write about their experiences. They’ll reference it in their papers and it will become a widely cited piece of work. If it’s any good, that is. If it’s really good it could become a seminal piece of work – the grandad or grandmom of a field.

But if it’s not, no amount of self promotion will save it. It will die, abandoned by even its adherents as they see that the idea has no following. Followers matter because it’s people who review what you’ve done and decide it’s worth having in the world that eventually enable your creation to live or die. You can’t flap a bird’s wings for her – she has to fly on her own.

Now, what this leads to is that you can do things the known way or you can set out into the unknown. And the known way includes the way you’ve done things so far. If you have a pattern, a flow a way of doing things then you might need to ask yourself what happens if the world as you know it ends? What happens if you run out of road?

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Take my own writing process, for example. Over the last few years I’ve established a rhythm – a flow of starting and finishing and coming up with something and getting it out into the world. And, as you do more of something, the more it becomes its own thing.

That makes me nervous – I’m not sure why. It’s like I have to test that when something is working it’s going to keep working by trying to break it. So, I’ve broken my process and it results in all kind of confusion as I try and work out what that means and what I should do next. For example drawing on paper rather than digitally creates all kinds of new questions – from the quality of the paper to how it reacts with different pigments and markets and how to get it into the computer and do something useful with it. And then there are those lines – and what you do with them and whether it’s ok to go outside them every once in a while.

There are questions about what you’re trying to do with the work you’re doing. Is the objective to create as much as possible or is it to work towards less but better? Do you try and get it right the first time or do you work towards a finished product in iterations? People do all these things in different ways in different contexts and it takes time to figure out what might work for you or for me. But you can’t think your way to the answer, you have to set off into the dark, onto the dirt track and just start walking. Hoping that there is something out there for you.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

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Manage Your Energy Or Someone Else Will

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Monday, 8.35pm

Sheffield, U.K.

Energy conservation is the foundation of energy independence. – Tom Allen

I’m a little low on energy today. Maybe it’s a biorhythm thing – the charts that I look at when I think about this sort of thing show everything at a low. Maybe biorhythms don’t mean anything but electric circuits do and I think they have something useful to tell us about living well.

Tom Allen’s quote has to do with energy, power, the stuff that comes out of a generator. But it could be applied just as well to whatever else you do. I’m starting to think that life is a zero sum game, where every unit of energy you give someone else is a unit of energy you don’t have for yourself. And that makes managing your energy really quite an important thing to get your head around.

For example, your creative energy can be used to work on your projects or work on your employer’s projects. If you use them to work on “work” projects you just won’t have enough energy left to do your own stuff. How many graphic designers go home and paint for the fun of it? How many chefs cook? How many writers write? I suspect those who do are careful not to give their all work, saving some energy, conserving it, so that they have some left when they get home and want to do a bit more.

I think that’s what’s happening today. I’ve spent a long time on a particular project and it’s just drained the energy I have left over. So, you might say, that’s ok. Take the day off. No one will notice if you don’t do what you want to do because that’s what you want to do. But that’s a dangerous argument, once you take a day off, it’s easy to take another day and then another one and before you know it a few years have passed and you don’t feel like you can do anything any more.

So, even if you’re tired you need to do the work. You need to get on and put something out that’s what you want to do. And that’s where the way to break out of a zero-sum game lies. It lies in routine and leverage.

First – you can keep going with muscle memory, just momentum from routine and the previous day’s work can keep you going even when you’re running on empty. Sort of like a flywheel that stores just enough to get you over the hump.

The second is to use leverage. Tools that help you do more quickly. Tools are amazing and if you get your toolkit working for you it’s going to help you out most during those times when you have little left to give. The tools will look after you if you look after them.

And then you’ll have another day behind you and time to recharge and start again.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

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How To Get Better At Doing The Right Things Fast

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Sunday, 7.55pm

Sheffield, U.K.

The primary factor in a successful attack is speed. – Lord Mountbatten

I have always believed that doing things fast is important. That’s because people are usually willing to give you a small amount of time to try something out but balk at giving you long periods. So, if you’re the kind of person who needs to get it right then you’re best off doing it the way that you know works – following the recipe exactly and honing your ability to get it right every time. I imagine that’s the state of mind a master sword maker has – someone who follows a sacred routine that’s been perfected over generations of practice.

I’m not a good recipe follower. Instructions tend to bore me and I find it very hard to pay attention when I have to do things in order. I like trying new things and if I have to do something – I’ll probably approach it in a way that’s quick and easy and dirty and hacky and see what happens. This has been a useful approach professionally – because I get given tasks that people find hard because I’ll figure out ways to get them done while the people who are good at doing the job do the things that we know how to do. So I end up doing things that are innovative – or at least different.

The flip side of being innovative, however, is that you can end up never doing anything well. That’s ok when it comes to business because the whole point of being part of a company is to work with people who have complementary skills so that you do more as a team than any one of you can do individually. But when it comes to doing your work – the work of your life which is the same as the art of your life then you need to take a different approach. Fortunately, I’m finding out that the way you do that is a refinement of my “speed is best” approach rather than a choice between fast or good.

But first, let me talk about a few people who are on YouTube and who I’ve been learning from over the last few days.

Christopher Hart and Terry Moore are well worth checking out if you want some brilliant tutorials on drawing cartoons. What’s great about watching professionals draw, rather than reading their books, is that you get to see their pencils move and, in particular, the sort of processes they follow. It’s one thing reading a book that says rough out your picture and then fill in details and a completely different thing watching someone who knows what they’re doing work through their process. It’s a funny thing but people who know what they’re doing tend to forget how to do it and make terrible teachers. I remember this vividly when we first had children. You forget what’s its like and advice from mums and dads was pretty useless and even people who were a few months or years ahead seemed to forget the details of how they did what they did.

Anyway, this point, about first roughing something out and then working towards a finished article is the opposite of what I do – back to that speed thing again. I get on, at full speed, get it done and then move on. And it probably shows, in my writing, in my drawing, in the material that’s on this blog.

And when you start doing it the slow way it’s painful. For example, in the image above I started with an idea and then realized I had to draw a particular kind of figure so tried to work it out and then had a go at the piece again. Now, if you know how to draw you’ll find all kinds of mistakes I’ve made. The ones I can see, given my lesser knowledge, include an inability to work out which limb goes where and the fact that you can smudge your work if you try and erase pencil lines without waiting for the ink to dry. Paper is unforgiving in this respect, when compared the to the digital approach I’ve taken for the last four years. Digital is fast but has not made me any better. Paper and pen and sketching have made me more aware of what needs to be done and where my limitations lie and where I need to improve.

So let’s talk about Ivan Brunetti. There are a couple of YouTube interviews with him and they are going to leave you conflicted on whether to admire him or pity him. This is a person who has done covers for the New Yorker, who has a legendary status in the comics arena and knows all the big names in the field. He is also someone that talks about suffering from a clinical level of depression that leaves him unable to pick up a pencil.

His experiences echo what the theory tells you. Should you go for the safe secure job or follow your heart? Is it important to work hard and push yourself or do something every day that accumulates over time? What does getting old do to your ability to produce – do you speed up or slow down?

We all need to work out our own approaches to these things. On the one hand technology can make us so much better at doing things. If you use computers in the right way they will augment you. If you use them in the wrong way nothing changes. Back in 1993 a Microsoft memo talked about how the world “writes with PCs” and how spreadsheets have replaced the columnar pad. But, even in 2021, people write in the same way they’d have written with a typewriter. The way you should write using a computer has been around for forty years but it’s never going to catch on because the tools most people use don’t support it. What most of us read, however, webpages written using html, does.

The thing about starting with a rough structure and then refining it – that fundamental process is actually the fastest way to get to a drawing that works. It’s also the best way to build a business that works or a business plan or anything else. And when I talk about doing things fast it’s pretty much the same thing. If you’re doing something new then you’re not going to get it perfect the first time you have a go. You’re going to have to feel your way to it, with initial exploratory work, finding the boundaries, the outline and then starting to work on the detail.

There are a number of reasons why doing this is hard in business. People don’t like to admit that they don’t know what the right answer is. Or they’re too scared to contradict the boss. There’s lots that happens in organizations and bureaucracies and companies that happens because we’re not willing to work towards a solution, preferring to work instead on what the top person wants. The two may not be the same thing.

After all, you’re going to get somewhere whatever you do. Hopefully you’ll enjoy it when you get there. But the thing you can definitely do is enjoy the journey.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

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How To Figure Out What You’re Trying To Do

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Saturday, 7.45pm

Sheffield, U.K.

There is always another way to say the same thing that doesn’t look at all like the way you said it before. I don’t know what the reason for this is. I think it is somehow a representation of the simplicity of nature. – Richard P. Feynman

In my last post I looked at how children approach art and how their relationship with with it changes over time, starting with unselfconscious “making” and then stopping when they start to realize that what they’re making is “not good”. And that’s a feeling that doesn’t ever leave us and, for many of us, we grow into adulthood not being good at the arts – not being able to draw or sing or dance and perhaps never going back to it again.

One reason we don’t go back, perhaps the biggest reason, is that it takes time to get good at something and, as we get older, we have less and less time. By the time we reach the ripe old age of eight the chances are that we know what we’re good at and what we’re not good at and know where we should spend our time. This probably has something to do with the 10,000 hour rule – if you start playing the violin at age 2 and practice three times a week until you’re 8 for 2 hours at a time, you’d have gotten in just under 1,900 hours. If you grew up in a household of musicians you’d have been exposed to music all that time. So, when it’s time to pick extracurriculars you’d probably go for music and when it’s time to get picked to play – that’s probably going to be you and the rest of us are going to stand in the background and hope no one see us.

Now, while there’s the whole thing about the 10,000 hours being about world class performance – it just so happens to be the amount of time you’ll spend on stuff you like doing all the way through school and the time you’ll spend on the career skills you learn in those first few jobs and you’ll end up being pretty good at that thing you do. But at the rest, not so much. So you stop.

But, of course, the point is that you don’t have to be world class at everything. You don’t even need to be good. You just have to be able to do stuff that makes you feel good and being able to do things like draw and sing and dance make you feel good but they are so scary to learn when you’re an adult and want to be good and, more importantly, hate to be seen as being bad. According to Josh Kaufman you need around 20 hours to be able to do something to a reasonable standard. And if you follow Tim Ferriss you can be world class if you play the rules rather than playing the game.

But I think the first thing to get clear on is whether you want to make money doing this other thing or not. If you already make money in one way – from a job or a profession or whatever – then you should keep doing that. The definition of work, as I understand it, is doing something that you would rather not do. So, make that thing bring in as much money as possible, preferably taking up as little of your time as possible and spend the rest of your time thinking about your art. And get clear that you’re not doing it for money – that helps. Eventually, if you’re lucky, your art may bring in the money but you need to be clear that it’s not about that. The rule to remember is this – if you do something and you get paid right away then you’re doing it for the money. If you do something and then some money maybe turns up, much much later, then you’re not doing it for the money.

Now, once we’ve got that straight, and this is me talking to me as much as it is to you, we need to look at the thing we want to do – and for me that thing is figuring out this whole drawing and writing thing because there’s something in there that intrigues and interests and excites me. The title and subtitle of this blog weren’t there from the start, they’ve emerged over time as the elements that persist in my work, using handmade artifacts – yes, words and pictures are handmade – to make sense of first the business of business and now the business of living.

And I’ve got to feel my way into a position of balance. And I won’t get there by thinking but by doing and making and the more of that I do the more what’s important will become obvious. Why do I think that? Well, it always has. When you pay attention to something then you start to see more and that seeing seems to make stuff visible. Stuff that was there all along but that you didn’t have eyes to see yet.

There’s something here that has to do with the story you tell yourself. Stories seem very important. After all, your basic biology lets you figure out the really important stuff – whether to stay where you are or run away. But the human part of you, then, is all about the story. The changes are that right now if you had nothing else you had to do you’d sit back and immerse yourself in a story, a book, a film, something that took you over. A business plan is a story. Your own goals, life plans, motivating messages are all stories you tell yourself. Science is a story that you can check out for yourself.

What’s the best way for you to tell the story that matters to you? I started yesterday with a child’s drawing. At the other end is a photo – a picture of reality that is as detailed as you could probably want. You could tell your story just using words or you could use a movie, a hyper-realistic graphic novel – any kind of media that you’re qualified to use. Unfortunately for me I’m not qualified for any of those other than perhaps typing out words. But maybe cartoons will help, cartoons that help me work through ideas rather than just relying on words. Perhaps one like the image that starts this blog – maybe that’s a form of representation that can work with the limited skills I have to get me where I want to be.

So… as I carry on do I look at the technicalities of cartooning and writing or do I try and explore a space by asking questions and seeing if cartoons can help me. There are lots of people who are much more qualified for the former activity – so perhaps I stick to the latter. Or I can try one approach and change later… there are no restrictions, after all. Maybe we just have a chat and see where it takes us.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh