I was talking to Jeff last week about journals as they relate to artistic process. He mentioned that Craig Frazier, the well-known illustrator / graphic designer, started putting up a few pages every day at 98pages.com. I saw him speak at an AIGA Boston meeting once, and he also showed a few of these pages. Now everyone can see!

I find Artistic Process to still be a mystery: though I do create artwork from time to time, I think my mentality is more like that of engineering. I generally know what I want to make, and then I make it. From what my more artistic friends have told me, this isn’t how you do things. You think on the paper, you play, you dream with line and shade. Me, I tend to think in words and flashes of inner light, and the act of putting things on paper is slow and awkward. However, I’m gradually coming to accept that working in the visual plane also should involve more of my senses. The things that matter to me are in the real world, after all.

Milton Glaser said something regarding sketching versus computer-based work in his “Design Ambiguity” lecture in Boston. Paraphrasing from my fading memory: computers aren’t very good at being “fuzzy”, and therefore it’s hard to see the possibility in a machine-created line. You just see the line, and it looks finished, and then the drawing becomes a tedious act of finishing. When Glaser showed slides of his sketches compared to finished work, there was a marked difference. Some sketches were closer to the finished work, but none of them were the same.

So the point? Thinking doesn’t happen purely in the head in isolation. Jungian personality type theory comes to mind, in which he describes how we have several “ways of apprehending reality”: (a) Sensation, (b) Intuition, (c) Thinking and (d) Feeling. Furthermore, these four ways can be either Extroverted (directed toward the outside world) or Introverted (directed primarily toward the inner world / self). This is the basis of the popular MBTI Personality Test, though it is not the same thing.

But I digress. I mention this stuff primarily because of the notion of Introverted / Extroverted function: I tend to find myself looking at the outside world for patterns to bring back inside my head; the world is a stimulus for the synthesis of inner ideas. I think to be more of a visual artist, the world is where the idea synthesis occurs. It will take some practice until that notion becomes habit, if I want to be more freely expressive in other media.