Hope springs eternal, and I love the syntax.
This quote also appears in the book that I have been reading recently and am still very taken with - Art and Fear: observations on the perils (and rewards) of artmaking. Particularly the following:
You don't have to do anyone else's work; just your own.
(To paraphrase - I'm here and the book is in the other room.) How liberating! And at the same time what fatalism! Liberating in the sense that you don't have to paint like somebody else, produce designs like you-know-who, or have hand-writing like so-and-so. You don't have to produce someone else's work, which is great because that's their work and you can do your own thing instead.
It's just that you have to do it. That's the hard bit, the inevitable necessity.
So, onto handwriting - yes, this is something that bothers me. Have you noticed that architects and industrial designers and design people in general have this very graphic, sharp, often pointy handwriting? Any architects out there (and I know that there are a couple) - do they teach you that handwriting in design school? It took me a while to realise that I didn't have to have that handwriting, just my own.
3 comments:
Great quotes! Funnily enough, no they don't teach you as such at design school- or at least, they didn't when I went through, and I suspect even less likely that they do today. But we had to do manual technical drawing, and it's standard that all notes on such drawings are uppercase, for legibility, so it's basically just a case of lots of practice and repetition kind of shapes it into something a bit more regular and graphic. Of course along the way I suppose you try to develop a nice, sharp graphic look to your writing, so that it doesn't detract from your meticulous drawings.
I once worked with an older guy who could produce incredibly regular handwriting (doing it without guidelines) and he told me that when he was studying they had to do pages and pages of copied text. Practice, practice, practice!
Can I just ammend that first sentance to add the word "handwriting" after "don't teach you"??
I've always loved the Camus quote--very inspiring.
Post a Comment