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From Mensagenda - August 2006
Ideadog.com
by
Brooks Peterson
To Do Is To Learn.
I’m amazed at how clunky my learning process is sometimes.
The first vessels I made in a college pottery class were
thick and asymmetrical. After observing someone else in the studio dragging a
wet sponge across the rim of his cup as it turned on the wheel, I realized this
was a nice way to finish the rim into a finer lip. I tried it, and when my next
batch of cups came out of the kiln, I was proud of how thin the lips were.
Unfortunately, while the lips of the cups were thin, the
walls spread out thickly like bell-bottom pants so that the insides of the cups
tapered like a V. Aha. I immediately realized the whole wall needs to be
thin, from the lip to the base. Piece of cake! I concentrated on this, and when
my next batch came out of the kiln, I saw ... success!
Until, of course, I realized that I’d left the bottoms
thicker than antique coke-bottle bottoms. So my next batch of cups and
pots was more uniformly thin — from the bottom all the way up to the lip. Of
course, they still weren’t symmetrical (nor well glazed, nor really
useful, nor beautiful ...).
In learning pottery I progressed along slowly like this,
building awareness in little steps. It seemed I had to go through the concrete
process of waiting until a batch had actually been fired in the kiln to hold it
in my hands and see what I needed to learn next.
I can handle the abstract intellectual thing. And it’s
necessary for getting ideas, shaping a vision, and so on. But I’ve seen many
times that to really learn, I have to do. In the last year I did
stand-up comedy a few times. I could have told you beforehand that writing for
stand-up is different from writing little 500-word essays. But I had to do
it a few times, tweaking my material each time, to really realize precisely how
and why it’s different. It was a very positive experience (though I don’t
aspire to do any more).
I know very well that I learn best only after concretely doing
(and somehow botching some aspect of) whatever it is that I’m trying to learn.
For me, this has applied to photography, illustration, Tae Kwon Do, skiing (and
so on). And I really know I’ve learned when an obvious hindsight smacks
me in the middle of the forehead. Then I do something a little differently next
time.
"We learn by doing" is a boring aphorism. But even
more boring is the know-it-all expert who doesn’t really do anything.
Artists must be especially frustrated by the person who views their work and
mutters, "Oh, I could do that!" Oh really? Could you?
Here’s a beret, Picasso Junior — get started! Our dear armchair expert
suddenly wouldn’t even know which end of the brush to hold.
Maybe Nike is onto something with their "just do
it" slogan; it happens to be how I learn best.
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