VOQOTD: Joan Miró

In the beginning, it’s a direct thing. It’s the material that decides. I prepare the ground-by cleaning my brushes on the canvas, for example. Spilling a little turpentine can also work quite well. If it’s a question of drawing, I crumple the paper. I wet it. The water traces a form .... This mark determines what happens next.... It’s the medium that directs everything .... The painter works like the poet: the word comes before the thought. You don’t decide to write about the happiness of men! If you do, you're sunk.

Make a scribble. For me, it will be a point of departure, a shock. I attach great importance to the initial shock.

- Joan Miró

Best books: some non-musical selections

Here are several books that have been valuable to me creatively over the years.  


The Adding Machine by William S. Burroughs
Great essays about art, language, and the craft of writing. Along with Exterminator!, my favorite Burroughs book.

"When Anthony Burgess was teaching a course in creative writing, a student asked him: "Why should you be up there teaching writing and not me?" A good question; and I wish I could give as definite an answer as can be given in regard to other subjects where the technology is more defined. No one, unless he is an experienced pilot, asks why the pilot of an airliner should be in the cockpit and not he. The answer is that the pilot knows how to fly the plane and you don't. Nor would a student of quantum mechanics, engineering, or mathematics ask such a question; the teacher is there because he knows more about the subject than the student. To say he knows more presupposes that there is something definite to know, that a technology exists  and can be taught to qualified students.

How many writers have taken courses in creative writing? James Joyce for one, took a course with some literary lady who had her students imitate the styles of well-known writers ... write Hemingway for a month, Graham Greene for a month, and so forth. A good exercise I think. But there are certainly, I think, more writers who have not taken courses in writing than writers who have. How many pilots have taken courses in flying? All of them, we hope. How many physicists have taken courses in physics? All of them. Which brings us to the question I intend to raise in order, I hope, to arrive at some answers: Is there a technology of writing? Can writing by taught?"  

The Natural Way to Draw by Kimon Nicolaides
One of the great modern method books on drawing. Here are instructions for making a contour drawing, one of the best exercises for learning to really use your eyes:

"Sit close to the model or object which you intend to draw and lean forward in your chair. Focus your eyes on some point- any point will do- along the contour of the model. (The contour approximates what is usually spoken of as the outline or edge.) Place the point of your pencil on the paper. Imagine that your pencil is touching the model instead of the paper. Without taking your eyes off the model, wait until you are convinced that the pencil is touching that point on the model upon which your eyes are fastened. 

Then move your eye slowly along the contour of the model and move the pencil slowly along the paper. As you do this, keep the conviction that the pencil point is actually touching the contour. Be guided more by the sense of touch than by sight. This means the you must draw without looking at the paper, continuously looking at the model.