After writing yesterday’s post I was reminded of a chapter in Frank Chimero’s The Shape of Design. It’s not the same thing exactly, but it resonated for similar reasons. After all, one of the reasons I like making art is that it does something helpful for my brain.
In the post, Frank writes about making mindless marks as a proxy for a walk through the city without a destination. Something to help “the hitches in his mind begin to unravel.” Here’s a quote from the book:
There is no subject, just as a good walk has no destination; their purpose is movement. My pencil cuts across the paper like a figure skater zipping around her rink, overlapping, skipping, and spinning. The skater ignores the mark that comes in the wake of her movement, and I do the same. This drawing isn’t aesthetic, it is kinetic—more like dancing than drawing.
From time to time since reading that years ago, I’ve done the same thing—sat at my desk with a pencil in hand, letting it roam the page with no purpose other than to get my mind moving in the right way. It turns out that to be the same feeling I want when making art, though.
My day job as a designer means that many of my waking hours are spent meticulously thinking about details, edge-cases and systems. I want my art to be something close to the opposite—at least right now. To simply start moving, intuitively, and let the piece reveal itself.
We spend so long sat in front of screens, making our brain work hard while our body just carries it around. Whether it’s your hand or your body, a little or a lot, movement unlocks so many wonderful things.