So, I’m learning to play piano and there seems to be 2 schools of thought on how I should go about it. The first is to find a teacher and learn the proper technique from day 1. If one doesn’t do that, the risk is that I’ll build some bad habits that will be more difficult to unlearn later. Proper technique involves hours of scales and finger exercises, learning music theory and playing ‘simple songs’ like Happy Birthday or Jingle Bells (not every adult’s cup of tea).

The second approach to learning piano seems to be to prioritise fun and making something that sounds like music as quickly as possible. Proper technique can come later. The idea behind taking this approach is to use it to orient one’s self around the keyboard and use one’s desire to play songs and music as the driving force for building an emotional connection to the instrument.

Which one to choose? What if I choose the wrong one?

Proper illustration technique

Any reader of this journal will know that I’ve always felt a bit like an imposter when it comes to illustration. I never went to Art School and yet, I’ve been professionally illustrating picture books across almost every publisher in Australia a few years after picking up a watercolour brush 10 years ago.

When I first began trying to learn watercolour, certain (very experienced) people told me that there’s a ‘proper technique’ to illustration (and watercolour painting). It’s about doing exercises in black and white painting (understanding values), charcoal life drawing, colour mixing exercises and pigment science etc – all that before you should start ‘making paintings’. I never did any of that. Instead, I stumbled forward through trial and error until I found an emotional connection with the medium and produced drawings and paintings that made me feel something.

Sure, perhaps doing some of that theory would have made a difference but, to be honest, I find myself more interested in pulling those ‘traditional learning’ threads while I’m working as an illustrator now because I have a need – I want to amplify the emotion I’ve found in the work and theory can be useful for some of that.

Proper piano technique

So, this brings me back to piano. As I’ve written before, for most things in life, we don’t need a piece of paper, a credential, or someone else’s permission to make art. I’ve never even considered hiring an art teacher to watch me paint so they can tell me how to hold the brush ‘properly’ – so maybe the same goes for learning piano? Maybe the proper technique isn’t about hand position and posture; that’s just biomechanics. And, whilst we all have our individual motivations and best ways to learn – for me, the ‘proper technique’ in any art form is emotion first, biomechanics and chemistry later.

I find an immense pleasure in the mess that comes with traditional art materials – they provide a setting with less control & order which increases the chances of accidents and serendipity.

With traditional art materials, I can put my markers on the left or right of my paper. I can hold a bunch of recently used mark-making tools in my left hand while I draw with my right. I can surround my work surface with all sorts of stuff so anything is in easy reach at any time. I can move using a combination of gross *and* fine motor skills (A2+). A physical art desk is a fully-customised user interface for making images. It actively encourages play, serendipity, accidents, and unintention – all whilst operating with a distinct set of limits constrained by physics and the physical world.

Digital works the opposite way. My ‘palettes’ are in the top right corner. The brushes I use are under the pencils, which are under the markers, which are under the textures, all in the “Pencil Case” folder. It’s neat – conducive not to accidents but order. Digital art workspaces bring procedural thinking to a process that could (or should?) be un-procedural. When I close my digital tools everything is clean and ordered. I can’t walk past them and see, at a glance, something that I could add, improve, or takeaway. With digital, I’m either making or I’m not.

With the mess created by the physical process, my art is always in the background – a presence that I can engage with as I go about my day. It allows my focussed work at the messy desk to infiltrate my subconscious and develop ideas even when I don’t think I’m thinking about. I like that.

About 6 months ago, I was in a flurry of ‘productivity’. I was busy making stuff for me. In that time I wrote and illustrated a 70-page graphic novel, a 12-page comic, and created about 50 drawings.

These projects weren’t for anything – they weren’t for an active client, or a prospective one – they were just for me. Play, in it’s truest form. A past me would’ve thought it all a big waste of time. There was nothing stitching these ideas together, they weren’t part of a bigger picture or plan.

About 1 month ago, I was travelling for work – I was there to attend a workshop about how to measure biodiversity improvement in landscapes. I landed at 9pm on the evening before the workshops and checked in to my very rough hotel. The place was cold and it smelled a little… funky. I had a shower, got into bed and realised there were no bedside lamps, only a single fluorescent light switch near the front door and I didn’t feel like sleep yet.

So, I picked up my notebook and began to scribble some words. Ever since I started this job, it’s always felt a little ironic to me; to have to burn jet fuel in order to attend a workshop about improving biodiversity. So, I started writing about it that evening, in that dodgy motel under the fluorescent light.

2-hours later, at around 12:30am, I realised that I had just penned the bones of a poem about something that, I realise now, I had been thinking about for a very long time; the separation humans have created between themselves and nature.

The next morning, I got to a local cafe at 6:30am and kept writing. By the time the workshops began at 9am I had pages of verse. I returned home 2 days later, exhausted from science, and took a fresh look at the bones of this poem. I refined it further until it felt ‘complete’.

It was a weird poem, and a weird idea. It never entered my mind that it could be a picture book text until my agent replied excitedly with, “I think we’ve got something here; what have you been thinking in terms of illustrations?”

Play that taps into the subconscious

This is where the story ends where it began. As it turns out, without consciously doing it, those 50 or so drawings from months ago, when paired with this text, had harmony. In fact, they were such a good fit that, together, the idea has taken on a life of it’s own and it’s much bigger than the sum of its parts.

There are some storytellers I admire for their way of exploring a persistent theme throughout their career in a variety of ways. Hirokazu Kore-eda comes to mind with his exploration of the different forms a family can take. And now I realise, more and more, that this is happening to me.

See, I’ve been circling the same ideas for a long time. I think it began with Queen Celine – a message about the importance of acceptance and diversity – and it’s since been extended to This Generous Earth, The Mountain and Flower, Evaporation, and now my new text, Hope. The human/nature relationship are at their core. Even my photography went there.

When we view someone’s work from the outside, it’s easy to invent the narrative of intention – they intended to explore this again, they came up with a scenario and, using design and logic, crafted a narrative that provoked further exploration. I could imagine someone thinking the same of my various projects but, in fact, it seems much more intuitive and accidental than that. It’s just that, well, the act of mark marking – whether they are drawings or words – provide a pathway for the subconscious to come to the surface. It seems it’s more about getting the jigsaw puzzle pieces out on the desk and then discovering that they fit together even though I couldn’t see a relationship between them when I viewed them in isolation.

I often wonder why so many people are desperate to get into children’s publishing. And, while I’m sure the reasons for it are varied, one of the things I love most about being able to draw (and it ending up in picture books) is that I end up feeling quite useful – and feeling useful to another human being feels good.

Rendering things fully – photographically – doesn’t leave much room for the viewer to participate in shaping, forming, or interrogating the idea. Words, on the other hand, are the other end of the spectrum. I can describe a ‘blonde man wearing a suit’ but you’ll need to fill in the gaps and the blonde man you imagine will be different to the one another will imagine. This phenomenon explains why we often think books are better than the movie – we’re participating more and not being shown that the main character is actually Ryan Reynolds because a movie director thought it should be.

This has profound implications for stakeholder management, pitching ideas at the right time, and collaboration towards an idea that’s better than the sum of each of everyone’s individual input.

By leaving things a little abstract, we offer an invitation to others; an opportunity to participate in our art and ideas. It’s fundamentally an act of generosity and humility. If people contribute to the idea, they’re more invested in seeing it succeed because they own a little piece of it. And, most of the time, the power of a group of humans working together on the same fundamental idea can influence more in the world than a single person working alone. So, why wouldn’t we give our ideas their best chance to succeed by offering them up with room to grow through the care of others?

Everyone knows that not every kid who plays sport will end up a world number one. We know that not every kid who picks up a musical instrument will end up with a triple platinum album. We know that every kid who enjoys cooking won’t be the next world-famous celebrity chef. And, despite this, we continue to play amateur sport, or amateur music, or cook casually for our friends for our whole lives.

Most of us don’t do this with drawing.

The drawing crisis

Almost every child before the age of 10 draws. The materials may be different (coloured pencil, crayon, markers, sand and sticks) and the subjects may be different (family, pets, the natural environment, laser-shooting dinosaurs) but almost every child makes marks on a surface.

As co-ordination and the ability to self-critique increases, the challenge for a child becomes to draw things more realistically; realism equals success. And, when realism doesn’t come or is more difficult to achieve for them then, say, their peers, drawing stops – they identify as someone who ‘can’t draw.’ Some scientists call this ‘the drawing crisis.’

I stopped drawing in high-school when it was ‘time to get serious about life’. I was one of the very few who drew beyond 10 years old – mostly because I could draw more realistically than others. But even then, my drawing stopped because of more ‘valuable things’ (i.e. money).

But, the idea of being an ‘Amateur Artist’ was never part of the discussion. In high school, the narrative was that I couldn’t do both. I had to choose – one path, one career, one direction.

And yet, I was encouraged to continue weekend sport, and continue to cook creatively, I didn’t play music but I know people who continued doing that as a hobby without any possibility of becoming a ‘pro.’

But now I’m pro

The ironic part of all this is that I found my way back to drawing after 20 years of doing other things as a profession – and now people pay me to draw and paint. It’s become a career. Not only that, but what I get paid to draw is not what anyone would call realistic – it’s fantastical, simple, a little child-ish; something a 10-year old child (or younger) would be proud of.

I don’t know how to ‘fix’ the drawing crisis, or whether it can or should be ‘fixed’. What I would love to see in the world are more people drawing for pleasure (not for creating ‘content’ and building audiences) – just as I take photos or play music without any hope of making something commercial from it.

What’s seems to be required is a shift; one that sees ‘realism’ in drawing not as it’s only end-state but one of many. To engage with drawings and visual art not for how they look but what they make us feel. To acknowledge ourselves as vulnerable and human; influenced by colour, shape, line and texture. We are, when it boils down to it, plants with complicated emotions. After sunlight, water, and food, perhaps what we need is art?

Until recently, I’d never heard of Joseph Martin Kraus. He was a music composer of the classical period – born in Germany and moved to Sweden in his early twenties. He lived a relatively short life of 36 years. I came across one of his symphonies accidentally, one in particular being inserted into an album I bought of someone I had heard of, Josef Haydn. I quickly fell for Kraus’ work – he’s one of my favourite composers now.

When I tell people like me, who don’t know much about classical music, about Kraus, I get blank stares – eyes that reply, “Who? Never heard of him”. When people think ‘classical music’ they think Mozart, Beethoven, Vivaldi, Strauss, Schumann, Schubert etc; people they’ve heard of because their work has been absorbed in the culture through visual media like movies and advertising. And, if they don’t know the names, all I have to do is say, “buh-buh-buh-buuuh” and people say, “Oh, that one? Yeah, I know that one.”

I find the idea that someone, 200 years from now, might connect with another human because of the art they made – whether that’s music, visual art, or something else – utterly romantic; a message to the future. When I listen to Kraus, I hear him saying to me, “See, you and I, separated by 200 years, are the same, you feel what I feel, don’t you?”

Maybe I don’t know enough about what’s ‘good’ in classical music, or what it is about Kraus’ work that keeps it relatively ‘hidden’ in our culture; is it because it’s not good? Is it because of the dominance of the others? Is it because we just repeat things in our culture that have worked before (like Monopoly, which is a terrible game)? Or is it for a myriad of other political, social, economic or technological reasons?

Not every work of every artist is a ‘keeper’, but the idea that there have been billions of artists before me, all with various messages to share, and to know that most of them have been destroyed by the passage of time makes me grieve. At the same time, it also fills me with wonder, that any art could survive at all so that future inhabitants may benefit.

It’s not likely that, in 200 years, someone somewhere will be reading my writing or looking at something I drew but I can see how, for some, it would feel like a chance at immortality.

Me? I’m assuming it all ends in about 50 years at best, so I’ll make the most of it now and let the future tell whatever story it wants to; about Kraus, Mozart, or otherwise.

What would happen if I drew random shapes with markers and tried to turn them into things? What would happen if I didn’t plan my composition first and went straight into drawing with ink? What would happen if I used pastel over watercolour? What would happen if I used crayons instead of pencils? What would happen if I did something different to what I normally do?

As a kid, ‘what would happen if…’ ruled my world. What would happen if I climbed this tree? What would happen if I went downhill on this skateboard on my stomach? What would happen if I jumped in this puddle? What would happen if I tried not to eat my vegetables?

The results of this approach were anything but safe. I never broke an arm, but I came close. I ended up with plenty of bruises but I never died. Questions that began with ‘what would happen if’ were the easiest way to test my limits.

They still are.

Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been drawing almost everyday. Not in a sketchbook, like I’m used to, but digitally. I’ve never felt that drawing digitally was drawing at all, it often felt like a different thing. But now, I’m finding that whilst it does feel different; it’s doing the same thing to my brain. The more I draw, the more I write. The more I write, the more ideas I generate. The more ideas I generate, the more I need to visualise them – it’s a self-fuelling loop and one that is nourished by the same activity of drawing whether using traditional or digital techniques.

On the way to our favourite local coffee shop, an old cypriot man lived in a garden full of fruit trees – lemons, cumquats, and oranges. His name was Ioannis (pronounced Yannis).

Whenever we passed Ioannis and he was in his front garden (either having a smoke or tending to the trees) we’d have a short chat. Depending on the time of year, he’d offer us some lemons, “These are sweet, you can eat them like fruit,” he’d say. They weren’t sweet, of course, they were just a different type of lemon called Meyer, but his optimism was lovely.

One particular morning, sunny but cool in that very Melbourne way, Ioannis was talking to me about his joy of gardening.

As we got to know Ioannis more, we learned that he had only recently lost his wife of 40 years, but still got up every day for his fruit trees, coffee, and always with a smile. Occassionally, we’d see him at the local market or out and about in the community – buying a new plant from the nursery or having a coffee with friends.

Shortly after this conversation with Ioannis, we stopped bumping in to him. I just assumed it was serendipity – I changed my regular coffee routine, he changed his. But then, a few weeks later, we walked past his house to find a “For Auction” sign attached to his wall – it’s not likely he went to a nursing home.

I still walk passed Ioannis’ now-sold house. The new people haven’t moved in yet so his fruit trees are still there and laden with fruit – I’ll be surprised if it stays this way. But, no matter what happens to that house on the corner, it’s likely I’ll always remember that if I’ve got some fruit trees, good coffee, and a smile, I’ll live a happy life.

My experience so far shows that Ioannis is on to something. Now, it’s time to plant my fig and lemon trees in the the front garden.