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The end of a path

by Henk ter Heide on Sunday January 3, 2010

It’s a good thing that keeping a new years resolution is a process and not an act. Otherwise I would have failed it already. Yesterday I did draw for more then an hour but I didn’t come around to writing this article
Ah well. Here it goes.

As my regular readers will have noticed, I haven’t done anything for some three months.
I had found that I couldn’t make the pictures I wanted with color pencil and had decided that I would start painting.
I had bought oil paints, an easel, a pallet and the lights I needed to photograph my paintings. I had even painted a few test panels.
And then everything halted.
It just stop.
I didn’t feel like painting any more.

I assumed that I would start painting again at some point. So I just waited.

The thing is that I have had this happening before. Often even.
I have had a lot of times that I am in the middle of some activity and for some reason just don’t feel like finishing it.
It used to annoy the hell out of my mother. She thought it meant that I was too lazy to finish my chores. (Although I never quite understood why she thought that joining a tennis club would be considered a chore.)

Over the years I learned that halting some activity for no apparent reason and then picking it up again a few weeks or months later, or figuring out what is wrong with it, is just part of being me.
So I waited.

The only thing that had me slightly worried was this blog.
This blog is linked to drawing and I felt that couldn’t keep all of you just hanging there. Not knowing what had happened.
I hate it when I’ve followed a blog for a few months or even years and it just stops. And I never find out what happened to the author.
Did he move on to other activities? Did he die?

A few weeks ago I started thinking that I should write some kind of brief explanation about why I wasn’t writing anymore. But a funny thing happened.
While I was thinking about how I should explain that this happens to me some times. That I didn’t know why I had stopped and didn’t know whether I would ever continue. I figured out why I had stopped.

Even better.
After I had realized why I had stopped, new ideas started flowing. And before I knew it I was drawing again.

I thought it would be best to first do a few drawing, to see if it would stick, and then tell you about my developments. But the drawing I’m doing right now is taking far too much time to do it that way. Although I drawn for more then an hour a day for the last week. I’m still only at about two thirds.

But still I feel curtain that this direction is so rewarding that I won’t stop after just a few drawings. I don’t feel that I have to test myself by finishing yet an other drawing before talking about it.

Why did I stop painting in September?
When I started thinking about it, it turned out to be fairly obvious.
I had lost my direction. I had lost my purpose.

When I started drawing early 2007 and started with this blog I had a very clear purpose.
I wasn’t trying to produce beautiful drawings. I was trying to find a way to express myself via drawings.

Being autistic and having a visual thinking process I find that I have to work very hard at expressing myself.
Before I can tell anybody anything about the people I meet and the places I go. I have to translate from the pictures and movies in my mind to words I can speak.
Although I’ve become quite good at it over the years, it’s still a lot of work.
Which means that I can write an article like this one, which is perfectly understandable.

But sitting on a stool in a bar I can either relax or talk with people. And since I go there to relax I never talk very much.
Lately a few of the costumers of my favorite bar have figured out that I’m quite knowledgeable on some subjects and they question me about them. And when they do, I answer them.
But it always feels like an interview. Never like a conversation.
To me conversation are just to much like work.

Three years ago I thought that since I have this visual thinking process and a photographic memory, it should be very easy to find a way to draw those people and places that I wanted to show the world.

But it wasn’t.
Using color pencil I quickly found that the pictures I drew never looked like the pictures in my mind.
For two reasons.
One of which turned out to be very obvious, when I finally thought about it. The pictures in my mind are of a photographic quality. Pictures I draw never are. Which, I suppose, is the charm of drawings. But it wasn’t what I had in mind.
The other problem is that I have a field of vision of 180 degrees. Just by the size of the paper that I’m using, a drawing is only about 30 degrees. Which is probably why a guy like Stephen Wiltshire draws such detail on such big canvases. It’s the only way to get the world in your drawing.

When I moved to painting I just assumed that I would solve both problems.
Bigger canvas would mean drawing a bigger part of the world. And since you can layer with oil paint you can indeed get more photo realistic pictures.

The one thing I hadn’t counted on was drying time.
With oil paint you can layer different colors on top of each other. But after each layer you have to wait until it’s dry. Otherwise the different layers will mix and everything will turn a foul color of brown.
Drying time can be as much as two or three days.

So imagine what that means.
No doubt you have seen those beautiful portrait paintings where the artist has put a little dot of white paint in the pupil of the each eye to suggest life.
Those two tiny dots of white paint take three days to paint.
That is a few seconds for every dot. And then three days of drying time before varnish can be applied.
(And after that the painting has to dry out for several months before it can be used.)

There is no way that I can work that way.
Most painters work either from postcards or from sketches they have made.
I didn’t want to do that. I wanted to draw/paint the pictures and movies in my mind.
I started out with the pictures because it seemed easier to learn. But to really show the world what I’m all about I have to draw/paint the movies.
But of course they change over time.
There is no way for me to keep an image in my mind for the several months it would take to finish the painting.

The first painting I wanted to do was a simple one of an apple tree in bloom in an English landscape.
I’ve been wanting to do a picture like that for as long as I’ve been drawing. I could never find a way to do it with color pencils.
But even such a simple idea keeps changing:
Will I put the tree in the foreground or the background. On a hill? Against a blue sky or a stone wall?

And that are only the questions I ask myself.
The color arrangement also changes. But that isn’t something I consciously think about. It’s just the way the world around me changes.
When the sun shines the pictures in my mind have all kinds of bright colors. When it’s an dreary day the pictures in my mind change to low hanging fog. And then at night I “see” a lot of greys and blues.

There is no way I can show my world using paint.
But even if there was. It’s far the much work. I was looking for an easier way to show my world then by translating the pictures in my mind.
This is far to difficult.

So without realizing what was wrong, I had reached the end of this path.

This is turning into a very long article.
Tomorrow I will tell you about this new direction I have found

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Lessons I learned while buying fish and chips

by Henk ter Heide on Saturday June 6, 2009

I know. This is rather a cheesy title, isn’t it
But the lessons I learned are so defining for my development as an artist that I can’t continue this blog without sharing it with you. So here it goes.

An immigrant’s son starts a business. Kind of a fish and chips shop (although in the Netherlands we don’t eat fish with our chips).
This is very special. Most immigrant’s son (and daughters) are unemployed. Some are getting their degrees.
A few (male) immigrants have their own tailor shop. But I know of only 3 or 4 entrepreneurial immigrant’s sons.

Although his shop is down the road from where I live I hardly ever go there. I don’t eat as much chips as I used to. When I go there it’s usually on odd hours and I’m the only customer. Which is nice because it gives me the change to talk a little with him.
He’s clearly very proud of his business and rightly so.

Last Thursday I didn’t feel like cooking and I went down to his shop to buy me some chips and fried meat. He was serving a few customers so I had to wait for a while. Which gave me the opportunity to watch him work.

I noticed a few strange things.
First I saw him watering his satay sauce down. I must say that I never seen anybody do that.
At first I thought he did it because the sauce had gotten too dry but soon I found that he was running out of sauce. Which is very bad timing on his part. But he commented that it’s something that could happen to anybody.
Then I noticed him running through his shop to get some meat out of the fridge.
When it finally was my turn I realized that he had taken as much time to serve three customers as most (fish and) chips sellers need to serve a dozen customers.

So while I was waiting for my bag of chips I wondered why there was such a gap between his and mine impression of his business. But it wasn’t until I started thinking about how I could explain it to him that I realized the problem.

Because he’s an immigrant’s son it’s not PC to comment on his business. He could think that you were actually commenting on the color of his skin.
So nobody ever does.
And if nobody ever comments on the way you do your business you must be doing a very good job.

So there it is. The story about one thing I learned while waiting for chips.

If you’ve ever read any advise on how you should go about writing a blog you’ll know that titles are very important.
If you want to become popular you should at least publish a few stories about things you’ve learned and the more cheesy the title the better.

But I don’t want to become popular. Or actually I do, but not in that way.
So I was planning to file this story away as something funny I couldn’t use in my blog. But the story kept bugging me.
This morning I realized why.

I’m in the same boat as this immigrant’s son. Apart from a few trolling art teachers (who are willing to give me a thousand boring exercises if I only turn control of this weblog over to them), I get hardly any criticism.
People tell me that I’m talented and how much they like me telling about my life. But as nice as it is to get compliments you don’t learn anything from them. You learn from criticism.
Which means that I’ll have to criticize myself.

Thinking about this, and some other problems I’ve run into, I realized that this will impact the way I write my blog.
I never aspired to be a day painter because I think that day painters let the need to publish daily trump the quality of their work. But this will probably mean that I post even less then I’ve done up till now.

The decision to criticize myself defines me as an artist: I’m not a blogger who draws but a drawing artist who blogs.
This means that I’m going to break every rule out of the blogging rule book.

In this blog I’m writing an account of my journey to become a better artist.
I’ll do that the way that feels best to me. I won’t be posting regularly. Sometimes I might be gone for a few days (or even weeks) if that is what I need.
You’re welcome to join my journey (rss feed).
But it is my journey!
No compromises.

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Crossroads

by Henk ter Heide on Wednesday May 13, 2009

I’ve been thinking about making a little money with this site by selling prints of my drawings. But for some reason I couldn’t bring myself to actually do it.

I’ve been telling myself all kinds of reasons why I haven’t yet tried it. Maybe because I don’t have enough drawings yet to sell. But I’ve got 19 drawings I could try to sell, which is more then enough to start.
Or maybe because it’s a lot of work to set up my site. But although I haven’t started yet I don’t think it’s that much work.
Or maybe because if I’m really successful it would mean that I should leave my save but boring job. But again that’s not really true. Even if I were to become successful there is nothing that would force to give up my day job.
Or could it be that I’m not certain whether I will ever have enough inspiration to make an other drawing I like enough to sell. Would it be fair to spend the next few years trying to sell the drawings I’ve made up till now.

Thinking about something Wil Wheaton said (Nothing is as safe as not taking creative risk) and experiencing how frightening it was to have the feeling that I might be talented. I finally realized what the problem is.

Making a drawing feels like making a test. Like the ones I used have to make when I was in school.
With every drawing I finish I feel satisfied for a while. Until I begin with the next one and again I feel I will be judged.
Not by you but by myself. By my conscience.
Am I really trying my best?
Not just playing around?
Am I producing a quality that is in line with the last drawing?

I find that I’m a far tougher judge then any teacher I ever had in school. But on the other hand I also feel that I should.
I feel that whether it’s about life, work or learning how to draw. What’s the point if you don’t try to push yourself to your limits

Due to my broken hip I’ve had a lot of time to think recently. One of the things I’ve found is that I’m running out of challenges in my work.
For a while I thought about going back to school. But that wouldn´t help. It was fun 20 years ago but now it would be just a repeat of an old challenge.

Although I’m not yet there I’m slowly getting round to the idea of setting myself the challenge to work towards the goal of living of off my art.

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Mission statement (Drawing: Sea edge)

by Henk ter Heide on Tuesday May 29, 2007

After I decide that I would like to reach a situation in which I could live from this website I’ve been reading up on ways to get more traffic to your website.

Apparently there are two way you can do that. (Well actually there are three but the third is almost cheating and I don’t cheat.)

Sea edge

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Quantity or Quality.
Problogger Darren Rowse posts up to 50 articles of a few hundred words a day. That way search engines have a lot of points of reverence to find. Steve Pavlina on the other hand post only a few articles a week but they are usually very long articles (a few thousand words) with a lot of advice in them.

Although my articles also only have a few hundred words in them they will always be only a part of the posting. The main reason to post is to show you a drawing and there is no way that I can make 50 drawings a day.

With a lot of experimenting in the last couple weeks I’ve found that I’m especially fond of the technique of blending colors. (Sometimes together with different techniques). Blending colors takes a lot of time. Depending on the subject a drawing can take several days.

I’m asuming that as I gain more experience the blending technique will take less time but I will never produce much more then three or four sketches or one (or two) drawings a day. And I won’t be drawing daily. I also have a day job.

Since quantity is impossible I will aim for quality.

Up till now I mostly posted the finished drawings. When I made several sketches I’d post those only to my Flickr account. That is something I’m going to change. It seems that some of my sketches also have some “strange” qualities. By posting them here you can see how I develop my drawings. Why I change the way I draw subjects.

Then there is the textual part of the posting. When I started the blog the main reason I had to post little stories was that search engines have a difficult time finding pictures without text.

But I can write stories. My “Henk’s verhalen” (Dutch) page proves that. I wrote most of those stories some 15 years ago. The last few years I was so tired from thinking about all the things I should tell people that they drowned out. But the last few weeks, while I try to talk less and less, I feel that the stories are slowly returning.

I will be adding some categories to the “blog” section. Probably something about the Netherlands and about drawing lessons. Maybe something about sheltered workplace in the Netherlands.

But the main focus for this site will always be on the drawings.

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Life! (Drawing: Topgraphical face 1th sketch)

by Henk ter Heide on Thursday May 24, 2007

I’ve been reading the weblog of Steve Pavlina for the last two years (or so). Although he can be a bit to new agie at times he also writes a lot of articles I find really interesting.

Over the past two years I have saved several articles planning to get back to them and do something with them. I never did.

The problem is that a lot of those articles are about things like setting goals and having priorities. But I never quite got what the relationship was between those two. I did understand the logic of applying priorities to the things you find important to get the things you want. But I never got what kind of goals would lead to what kind of priorities.

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Apart from the dream of having a half a million Euro drop in to there laps people hardly ever talk about there goals. They do talk about there priorities but to me it always seemed as thought they (wanted) to spend a lot of time doing things I really don’t want to do: Going to the movies with your boy (girl) friend, having a career. (A few years ago while I was trying to improve the working conditions within Promen I was told that I’m very ambitious. Am I ambitious?)

Yesterday Steve finally wrote an article about the relationship between goals and priority: “You want to make the greatest amount of progress towards your goals with the least amount of effort.”

While reading this article the penny dropped. Setting goals is about what I want. Setting priorities is about getting the things done I want to have done. And since I’m autistic I need different things then most people.

So what is my goal? My goal is to reach a situation where I can live as a kind of a reclusive and talk with as few people as possible.

What do I need to reach that goal?

Not having a job. There is no way you can have a job and meet colleagues and not talk with them. I’ve tried. They always think that you’re in a bad mood and try to brighten your day. Which in my case just causes a bad mood.

To live without a job I need to find a way to earn at least €1500 a month after taxes.

When I started this weblog it was meant as a way to publish my drawings. Drawings are my voice. Drawings are the way I express my self. Not having a way to publish them would be like giving a speech to an empty room.

Although I’m not all that in to brandnames I did want to have a Google search engine on my site. I wanted one on my last site and I search high and low before I found out that the search engine is actually meant to earn money. I never quite understand why I’d wanted a Google search engine but now I do. Having a Internet landmark on my site is a way of giving it a bit of structure to my site. It’s not something I’m doing for my visitors but for myself .

After a while I also decided it would be nice to have a “donation” button. Not that I expected to earn a lot of money with donation button, but it would be a nice way for people to let me know they appropriate my drawings.

Having a goal will change the whole layout of my life. I will get to make different choices, do different things. A whole new way of living.

Art

Today’s drawing is a bit experimental.

Topographical face 1th sketch

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