The First of a Double-Take
Back to Creativity or Art.
I posted this to Mastodon the other day with the note:
"A reminder from my pocket notebook: Use your head."
It’s a really quick pen drawing I scribbled at a restaurant table:
If I were to give it a museum label card, I think I’d go with:
KEEP YOUR HEAD, 2026 Ink on paper, 8 x 7cm Personal collection
In response to a positive comment by manifoldslug, I wrote:
"As has happened before, the 'idea' came to me when I thought I actually saw this image out in the wild, but on closer inspection, it wasn’t even close to this at all! So I drew what I thought I saw."
To which manifoldslug replied:
"it seems the first take of a double is often the more interesting one :D"
Which is exactly right! I thought I’d seen a clever piece of street art, but the cleverness had happened in my own subconscious, a reaction to a damaged but otherwise ordinary bit of public signage.
Starting sometime after 2014, when I started to take sketchbooking more seriously and trying to post a bit of art more-or-less daily online, I began to take notice of a phenomena: I would often see the thumbnail of a piece of art (or in real life, something in a distant store window) that, upon closer inspection, was nowhere near as interesting as I had thought it was.
In miniature, what had appeared to be a fiery demon rising from a mountainside might end up being a flower. Or a strange-looking portrait might end up being an everyday fashion advertisement with the person facing the opposite direction as I’d originally imagined!
This happened often enough that it finally dawned on me after dismissing these wrongly-seen intriguing images that there was absolutely nothing wrong with drawing what I’d thought I’d seen. The colors and composition might retain a superficial resemblance, but the only thing I was ripping off was my own imagination.
I’d love to conclude this with something monumental like, "These have been the greatest things I’ve ever painted," or something to that effect. But I’m not sure that’s true. It’s just another funny facet of creativity that awaits anyone who notices things.