On imagining things

knowing things and being human

Early one morning this week I was remembering that my adopted Dad and I often read the same books so we could talk about them. One the books we both read was “The Log From the Sea Of Cortez" by John Steinbeck. That book inspired long discussions about the woven interconnectedness of observed reality and imagination and memory. Of those three strands, as a barely out of my teens young person, I thought reality, things that could be proven in the real world, was the most important. Dad disagreed. He thought the most important strand was the imagination.

That surprised me.

Dad was a psychiatrist, a scientific medical man who, when quoting someone, not only identified the speaker but named where he had read the quote, often with the exact page number. When I asked him to explain why he preferred imagination he replied to the effect “We do our best thinking when we're able to observe things in the real world and then imagine how that observable fact might affect our own and others’ lived experiences. We also think better when we're willing to imagine that what we think we observe or what we think we know might be wrong!”

Anyway, the morning I drew this sketchbook page I was thinking of the importance of curiosity and imagination.

Another morning I was still thinking on the topics of curiosity, imagination and creativity while drawing this during breakfast.

Also on the topic of imagination I have this quote thumbtacked to my studio wall.

Recently when it snowed I looked out my window and, with brown ink, drew a tree in my neighborhood. Here's the tree I drew.

Here was the view from my window that inspired my drawing.

Here's the same view moments later while I was still in the act of drawing.

As a result, much of the above tree drawing became more imaginary than realistic. I wasn't about to tell our cat he was blocking my view 🤣 so I finished my tree drawing from memory and imagination.

Our cat had noticed the many crows flying and roosting… and it was quite a sight! So I joined the cat in watching.

I started thinking of crows and trees and that wispy, soft line-drawing look the snowy day evoked. I'm thinking imaginary trees and crows, loosely based on memories of trees and crows I’ve seen in real life, might be a fun little wordless panoramic accordion book. So during another morning I started making one …

… and I'll work on it over the coming weeks. At the moment I do not have a grand idea or plan for this book project beyond having fun thinking about trees and crows while drawing and trying to capture that soft wispy nature feeling.

Our human brains are amazing in our abilities to observe, remember and imagine. I hope you'll have fun, too, with your mental agility!

P.S. subscribers get a regular breakfast table view of my sketchbook pages and other projects as they develop. Which is to say you get to see what I observe, remember and imagine. Paid subscribers can download ebooks that I've written and illustrated from my index page of 12 titles (so far) here. Thank you all for reading my work!