The good thing about working to your own rules is that you can change them as and when you feel. This morning I felt the urge to continue working the colours into a second image…
I spend a lot of time thinking about the concept of winging it… It is pretty much my M. O. and although people often take me for an air head, I feel little inclination to set them right… I’m kind of of the opinion that if you can make something look so easy that people think there’s no skill to it, it may be in part due to a natural gift but more it’s a sign that it’s something that’s been practiced over and over and polished nearer and nearer to perfection… For example, allegedly I’m quite funny… I’m very swift at landing a well timed punchline… And people take that as off the cuff wit… I’m not so sure… I think it’s maybe a modification of social anxiety… I think it’s something I’ve been crafting for over half a century… Crafting to the point where I just know something is funny even if I’ve not paused to work out why… Sometimes I don’t even realise I’ve said something funny until people around me laugh, tell me it’s funny, and I silently think oh… Yes, so it is…
I remember that my English teacher at school used to despair and plead with me to just for once, write something serious. Stop making jokes! I took this criticism to heart and went away and wrote with deadly seriousness… Thinking back, I probably wrote my first rantra… We’d been told to write about something that made us feel angry or annoyed… I vaguely remember turning in half a dozen pages on why chain smoking badminton players who try to lecture me on healthy lifestyle choices are barking up the wrong tree. Honestly, I’d never been so deadly serious in my short life, which written as a 15 year old, I guess inevitably came out unintentionally as the most hilarious thing I’d ever written and my English teacher would most probably have loved to unleash all manner of profanities at me but instead, he tore the pages in a frenzy, screwed them into a ball and slam dunked them into the grey square sided metal bin next to his desk, where most of my efforts ended up…
I remember being genuinely confused and on the brink of tears not knowing what the hell I was supposed to do… If I write something funny, it’s wrong, if I write something serious, it’s even more wrong? I made the mistake of saying that out loud… That was the final straw for him, he bellowed at me FOR THE LOVE OF GOD BE QUIET LET’S JUST GO ONE DAY WHERE YOU DON’T MOCK ME!
But… But I didn’t write about YOU?!
Oops another accidental punchline punctuated by classmates dissolving into helpless fits of laughter…
OK? What the fuck was I talking about? Oh yeah… Winging it… I looked at the first image I drew and laughed… I wondered – do images prompt thoughts or do thoughts prompt images… Did I accidentally lay down a pun about my thoughts of late..? So I decide to go again and close my eyes and float the silent instruction… Give me some detail…
I open my eyes and seriously? More detail is to draw up close the feathers on those wings… Yeah thanks! That’s really helpful and ha ha ha funny!
But then often when you analyse details of why something is, then you suck the life out of it and lose the moment and the bigger picture…
I took a break to ponder on that by not really thinking about it and I flicked through fb memories to find this…
Hmm winging it… Maybe it’s riffing in a way that helps others to make sense of what they see, and then go on to use that exchange of words in a practical way, rather than boring the shit out of them by telling them what you know it actually means on a theoretical level? I don’t know… I do know that I used to be able to explain the offside rule but I sure as shit can’t play football…
The pure and blessed way 