Storyboards...

Human face has this incredible feature. It records everything. I don't know how, but everything puts a scar on it. It bears the scar of first love, broken hearts, sorrow, joy, hunger, pride. It bears the scar of all the seasons, winters, summers, autumns and rains. Scar of deaths, and diminished glow of long past triumphs. The tiniest wrinkles that all the new seconds bring and leave there when they pass.
All the dried leaves stepped on, all the rivers crossed.
All the dreams dreamed, all the lives touched.

A human face becomes this wonderful storyboard of life. When I see it, the immensity of those fascinating stories moves me so profoundly, so deeply, that the outburst of passion is literally suffocating. And I feel this inevitable urge to express. I wish I could paint. Only painting can bring this forth...

And composing music.

Alas! I know neither.

Enthusiasm

Once upon a time I used to share the same enthusiasm of this guy. I think deep down I still harbor this feeling.

Five lives of an artist

This TED talk by KK Raghava clearly shows the power of courage and honesty of your soul. How he evolved to be this artist and living this life that can inspire so many! A 17 minute display of a very youthful life full of life...

Natural Philosophy and Some Thoughts

In Newton’s time they didn’t use the term ‘science’. Rather, the prevailing term was ‘natural philosophy’, the branch of knowledge explaining and exploring natural phenomena. Now, I am not going into the etymology of this term. What I am going to say is somewhat related to the feeling this old term gives me.

I am a strictly scientific person with a great passion for almost all type of art-forms. And the fundamental belief that drives me to all my pursuits is that, beauty is a ubiquitous entity. It can range from mathematical equation about natural facts to the wisdom of a poet writing about human hearts. And to me the sound of this term ‘natural philosophy’ gives this air of knowledge more concerning this ‘Beauty’.

Now look around. All the fascinating things you see started with a big bang. And recently I have learned to look into it in an interesting way-

After big bang there was a moment when all there was Hydrogen atoms and few laws of nature. And starting from there we have this immensely complicated universe. With Galaxies, Stars, ‘Superstars’, lay people like you and me, poetry, literature and every other conceivable thing. So, we see what even the simplest and almost mundane atoms of Hydrogen can do if you give it some 13 billion years!

Can't you feel that this interesting way of looking into all these scientific facts has some kind of literary value? And this value can actually add up to the collective ‘human wisdom’. And the first time I heard some scientist say it that way, actually gave me great excitement and pleasure in my heart. Yes, though I am a scientist, I have hearts; and not only a heart that pumps blood to my brain but also another heart that is emulated in my brain, in side all the billions of synapse connections of my neurons that makes this worthless collection of matters, that is the living body, have some feelings.

Now I think I am getting carried away with some sort of emotional impulses, because I happen to have emotions regarding science! Whatever…

I think already nobody is reading up to this passage of this article. So let me tell something more about looking into things in a way which, i think, has some literary values and some useful implications. It concerns creativity and narcissism. Two utterly unbearably pleasurable(?) disease I occasionally suffer from.

Let’s begin with one piece of wisdom I have finally found-

Do not try to explain any of your creative processes; you will only end up making a fool out of yourself.

And one thing I can say for sure, that narcissism hampers creativity a lot. It actually kills creativity. Once people start to say ‘how genius you are’ that is actually the 'death sentence' for your creative genius. You start to give importance to their words; you become narcissist, stop taking risks, stop exploring new ideas for the fear of failure and go for all the things that worked so well previously. And consequently you become some type of mediocre, or even worse 'non productive'.

Now here is a way of thinking that might ‘save your soul’…

Some of us write poems. You can look at it this way. All the words were already there in the language. What the poet did is, just found a way to arrange them, so that it feels good. I mean, it is the property of those selected ‘words’ that if you arrange them in that way it becomes, what we call, a piece of poetry. A particular person finds it by just some ‘lucky accidents’. Of course he, as a poet, was searching for it but it might happen that he never finds it. Same story goes for a Scientist looking for some underlying mathematics of a natural phenomenon. One can even think about the beginning of ‘Evolution’. Some chemicals combine in a particular form in some lucky accident and a whole era of ‘beauty’ starts! Same governing dynamics... every where!

Let’s not drift away into that direction and without wasting any more time make the final call-

Don’t be a narcissist. Whenever you have done something incredibly beautiful remember, you, as a person, have done nothing. The nature had this immense possibility to be formed in that particular beautiful form and it is an accident that you were involved in that process. And of course you want to be part, or at least be a witness, of these types of processes because it is an immensely pleasurable experience, worth living a meaningless life.

Live to the light.

Plato says I am an Egalitarian!

Quoted from Plato's Republic-

‘So that’s how he lives,’ Socrates said. ‘He indulges in every passing desire that each day brings. One day he gets drunk at a party, the next day he’s sipping water and trying to lose weight; then again, he sometimes takes exercise, sometimes take things easy without a care in the world, and sometimes he’s apparently a student of philosophy. At frequent intervals he gets involved in community affairs, and his public speaking and other duties keep him leaping around here, there, and everywhere. If military types aroused his admiration, he inclines towards the military life; if it’s businessmen, he’s all for business. His lifestyle has no rhyme or reason, but he thinks it enjoyable, free, and enviable and he never dispenses with it.’

‘You have given a perfect description of an egalitarian.’ Adeimantus said.

‘Yes,’ Socrates said, ‘and I think he’s also multi-hued and multi-faceted, as gorgeous and varied a patchwork as that community is. His way of life can be admired by many men and women, because he contains example of so many political systems and walks of life.’ :P

Ah, Beauty!!

There is a thing called 'beauty itself'. Most of the people see a lot of beautiful things and think beauty is some property of those objects. Which is, to some extent, wrong. The actuality is there exists universal beauty. The beauty itself is not a plurality, it exists with a harmonious singularity. For example, Look at this water droplet video. Isn't it beautiful?


You might say, "not everyone will find it beautiful!" To those of you I would like to say that, 'flowers will keep blooming. If you don't find it beautiful, you lose.' And of course the search for beauty itself requires a lot of work. Ask the mathematician how many sleepless night it took even before starting to grasp the beauty of mathematics. Look at any other art-artists. The same history repeats.

The world around you is really fascinating. All you need is a curious mind. And of course some love for the beauty itself.

Here's a final recap!

30 Years of BAD Pictures from Bruce Dale on Vimeo.

Reinventing the wheel

Last few days I have been working on pen and ink drawing. It’s amazing how ink rendered drawing turns out. Yes here your strokes are one shot. You don’t get to take back what you do and also don’t get to do it again, something that has a great philosophical significance.

For a long time I wanted to be able to draw landscapes. It’s something that amazes me a lot. The things that I perceive through my senses, the way each scene makes me feel I wish there were some way to express that. One might ask ‘why do you need to express? What is the use?’ That is a question the answer of which one has to figure out oneself. Human history of science and arts is a history of expression and exploration. Technology, hmm that’s about utility.

It’s something like oxygen, something like mathematical formulae. Even if no one finds it, it’s there. Same thing is true about beauty, and finer feelings. As we are human with limited life span and limited amount of intelligence, it is not possible for us one (or a few, or all of us) to invent everything. That’s where the idea of expression comes. To me, the urge of expression is one of the core elements of our existence. It is as basic as ‘curiosity’ or ‘love’.

Ok, let’s cut this philosophical mumbo-jumbo. And head straight to what I want to say. The difference between landscape drawing and landscape photography is, in drawing you not only get to express what is there, but also get to express what you see and what you feel about what you see. You can make other people perceive the way you perceive it. Make the same joy, same wonder to replicate in others. Of course it depends on your painting skills. Yet, there are a lot of skillful painters and a very few artists. Skill is important. But what is the use if you know all the languages and you have nothing to say?

So, here I am. I don’t have skills but I think I have something to say which I cannot express in words. That is the reason I am undertaking this pen & ink endeavor. Michelangelo Buonarroti once said, “A man paints [or draws] with his brains and not with his hands.” For the last few years I am doing this ‘painting with brain’ thing persistently. I think now is the time I start some match practice also.

*

Once I was puzzled by the idea of perspective view. It makes things look real but there is this flaw in teaching about this technique. They ask you to fix some vanishing points and draw accordingly. The choice of vanishing point seems arbitrary. There is another false impression we get about vanishing points. Often if seems there is only three vanishing points!  In fact there is no limit in the number of vanishing points. Every set of parallel plane has its own vanishing point. It is just that, in three dimensional space we can get at most three orthogonal planes. That is why only three VP is taken for basic training. But remember every tilted parallel plane set which are not aligned to these three coordinate directions will also have its own vanishing point.

To choose a vanishing point of a plane you have to imagine yourself standing on that plane. Think of your eyes’ height from the floor. Take the horizon line parallel to the plane and on the exact height of your eyes. Look at your left and right do you have any line shooting towards infinity which is parallel to the floor and perpendicular to the horizon line?  Connect it to the vanishing point on the horizon line. How do you know where on the horizon line the vanishing point sits? It’s simple. Usually it is halfway from the side on the horizon line. But you can actually turn left or right. Then the amount of your turning creates a shift of the vanishing point towards right or left.

This way for every tilted plane you find vanishing point. Just remember there are a lot more vanishing points than three. And the finding of them has to be geometrically correct at the same time intuitive for the artist.

Active Neurons

I think I have found a way of increasing the active neuron count in my brain.