Ludwig finds everything fairly inspiring
Maybe drawing cats is being an activist.
I had this cat I used to draw in lessons, on margins, on my pencil case in tipp-ex. I called him, unimaginatively, Fat Cat. I was quite good at drawing and could draw more realistic cats than this one, but I didn’t really want to. This drawing here is one I made a while ago and is another incarnation of Fat Cat, only with biscuits.
The daftness of a cat with a vast triangular blob for a body and teeny little paws was soothing to me. I could draw him without trying hard. The limitations (no shading, no realistic body positioning) were what I needed in my overstimulated brain. I’ve talked elsewhere about the magic that happens when you actually limit yourself on purpose in order to get something done. Phil Hansen found this out the hard way - he was an artist whose intense pointillistic technique caused a neurological disorder.
In order to continue, he had to work within limitations which seemed career-ending at first. But he ‘embraced the shake’ and found a completely new perspective and medium, going on to start a movement and inspire loads of people. Like me. Here’s his TED talk, if you’re curious.
We can learn to self-impose limitations in order to reduce the options available to us. Why do this?
Because it stops our cunning brains buffering in search for ‘the one’.
The right path. The right novel idea. The right research topic. The right way to save the world. The key to everything.
There can be a fine line between self-sabotage and intentional self-limitation. Sometimes this line is like a skinny path on top of a rocky mountain between deep chasms full of hungry bears. There’s a nice comfy stool where you can sit and buffer all you want. I’ve spent a long time there these last few years.
What I’ve noticed is that my tendency to go too far either into aspirations of perfection or beating myself up about not even starting to draw or write a single line keeps me sat buffering on that stool. Meanwhile, the world is still burning, novels get left unfinished like the paintings in that classic Ladybird book The Magic Paintbrush (topic for another post - but the hero Liang learns to leave a little corner of his paintings unfinished in case they come alive and wreak havoc), and years go by.
So the trick is to limit yourself, but not so far that it feels incapacitating. Sure, this week has induced panic in me over a) the very state of the world, what with the release of the Final_final_yes_we_are_doomed_please_listen.pdf Synthesis report from the IPCC and b) the very state of my bank balance, and it’s easy to feel like drawing cats or writing stories won’t make much of a difference.
But what do I know? Maybe the Koch brothers and all the world’s richest most corrupt fossil fuel lobbyists and their politician chums have a thing for cats rendered in unrealistic 2D. Who’s to know. Not me, unless I draw more cats. It might be the only way to get through to them and save the planet.
If you were a child in the 1980s UK like me, your eyeballs will have forever seared into them those haunting pencil drawings from Raymond Briggs’ 1982 graphic novel (and later, film adaptation) When the Wind Blows.
Watching the animated film aged 8 or 9 was a trauma none of us will forget. Those images and words, the songs in the film score, and all the work behind the scenes of the producers, animators, artists, accountants and more had an effect on so many of us. It made many of us enthusiastic supporters of the CND. It made lots of us get the ick about nuclear power which may, in hindsight, not have been so great for reducing emissions from fossil fuels, but the point is, the effect was strong. Do you remember When the Wind Blows?
So this is a little talking-to-myself I do when it seems to me that I’m not doing enough, or the right thing, or being much of an activist.