Twists And Turns

Our lives are like roads. By analogy, the features of a road can be likened to different aspects of our lives. This analogy can be useful, because it can help you produce a framework for understanding what happens to you and to others.

Curves

Curves in a road are required by the local terrain to keep the road smooth enough for you to continue to navigate it properly. In our lives, the local terrain becomes the external forces that mould and shape our lives, constraining our path. Such things as our family, our mentors, the schools we went to, the jobs we worked, the people we loved, the successes we had, and the crises we went through qualify as external forces. They are a bit automatic, since they don't affect the linearity of the road (in the sequential sense that the next part of the road naturally follows what preceded). A tornado that destroys your home is a terrible thing, but if you survive, you rebuild or move and life goes on.

Hills

Hills in a road, where steepness is increased, require you to use more energy to continue at the same pace. Life, on the other hand, can get more difficult for you if you break a leg. Then you may have to work twice as hard to get where you are going. Periods of economic austerity, requiring you to work two jobs at once, or a period when you go to school at the same time as working a job are good examples of such difficulties. Even when you have a baby and you get awakened at all hours of the night can make life more difficult in the short term. Not that it isn't wonderful!

Turns

When you take a turn at a fork in the road, you are making a decision in what would otherwise be an unchanging linear path. In our lives, such a decision, through causality, might completely affect what follows just as taking that turn on the road might very well alter your destination.

Decisions are the turns of our lives.

When you decide to take that job in another city, requiring a move, you have made a life-altering decision. If you take the job, then you might be turning left. If you don't take the job, then perhaps you are going straight.

If a decision is forced, then it is really more like a curve in the road. There is no opportunity to turn. Or if there is a turn there, perhaps it is blocked with those orange cones.

But, like on the road, we find that, in life, doing the hard thing can sometimes produce better results than simply taking the easy path.

All Roads Lead to Rome

There are certainly reasons to believe that not all decisions will completely alter what follows. This is because, often, all roads lead to the same place. It's just that they arrive there by a different path. And this is not an insignificant aspect of life.

Overpasses

Sometimes you must pass over another road, or under. In life, sometimes things happen externally that don't affect you, like a vacation that everybody else went on. They just pass you by. Sometimes it seems that there's no point to an overpass, but it does help to address the problem of crossings. In life, things can happen in parallel that might ordinarily affect each other through sequestering. Perhaps these are more like lanes in a road.

Twists

Still, largely, roads are embedded in the plane: the surface of the earth is locally a planar topology, though globally it wraps around. When a turn becomes too complicated to embed in the plane (like a road normally is), it becomes a twist. This is akin to what happens when everything in your life turns upside-down. Nothing makes sense. You lose your bearings.

But also, on a road, there can be unnecessary complications: the right lane turns left and the left lane turns right. This is sometimes forced by the multi-level nature of roads, or by the requirements of a turning radius.

You see, unnecessary complications do happen and they are a consequence of things getting too complicated to treat in a simple way. Perhaps they are the result of bad planning. But, as they say, in a battle the plan is the first casualty.

The topology of life is an unrelenting problem and things can get hopelessly tangled up so they can't be separated. We have talked about knots and weaving, fabric and rings, but the humble road is such a good analogy for life, because of its sequentiality. There is something calming about driving a nice straight road. In a similar sense, life seems to be at its best when it is simple.

It's best not to have too many twists in your life. It seems that breakdowns occur when life gets too complicated.

But life does not always comply with our wishes for simplicity.

Roads have another feature: the dead end. This is a place where the road can go no further, at least, in this direction. In life this is simply death, of course.

Me, I think I'll drive onto the ferry and find more road!

Winding River

Life is a winding river flowing through the events of our life and the river's course, its bends, and forks are like the decisions we make and also the ones we are compelled to make by external forces outside our control.

You see, metaphor is a very powerful method of depiction, indeed.

The presentation of symbols in illustration is a natural method, and it is used in more drawings than I can count. It has been used in paintings since the medium was invented. I suppose initial paintings were quite literal: pictures of animals that were hunted and the tribe and their weapons. But one iconic form appears: the outline of a human hand. This is the artist's signature and simple metaphor for "I painted this", usually done in berry juice. The hand is a symbol, a relic, of the artist himself or herself.

In a recent blog entry, Back to Drawing, I introduced a concept sketch of a banner which, laden with symbology, was a metaphor for a singular event. In this post, I present two more banners that also further the concept of metaphor in illustration.

Here is the first banner, the winding river. In the sky are the Pleiades, also known as the seven sisters (although eight are shown: what do you make of that?).

I have used a digital woodcut technique for this banner, as it is my style of late, and I also employed a technique of colored chiaroscuro for suggesting distance.

The river cuts deep channels through the rock, suggesting that, downstream, greater and greater effects are made as the river gains volume from the tributaries and momentum from its rush from the mountains. In this way our works gain momentum and have greater and greater effects through the course of our lives.

My symbolic suggestion is that the stars have some influence on the path of the river, and thus of life. The seven sisters are known for their ability to impart divine knowledge and wisdom. The wisdom that governs our works.

A river's flow is known and set, and rarely changes over the course of a hundred years. The lay of the land it flows through will determine its course, like the situation our lives occur in and also the examples set for us which can influence our own acts in life.

But sometimes a river meets a point where the terrain shifts suddenly, and the course is altered in an abrupt free fall. This is the subject of the second banner.

Ah, the waterfall. When something comes down as a result of the force of gravity, it always reminds me of an avalanche. Because I have survived one.

This notion of a river rushing and going over the edge is a powerful one. I have shown the waterfall with the steps leading up to it: a dangerous and tenuous set of stairs leading to the top. At the top, are railings so you can see the rushing river as it plunges.

It reminds me of Vernal falls in Yosemite. I have been to the top and I have seen the rushing river. The rock slopes to the river are a channel cut deep, with slopes that make them quite dangerous. Since the rock is wet, they can be slippery and people have been known to circumvent the railing so they could be photographed in a dangerous position, and then subsequently fall into the rushing river where they were simply and hopelessly carried over the edge to fall over 300 feet to their inevitable death.

The waterfall is the symbol of life out of control. Events which you cannot control force your life into a specific direction. The path seems implacable, cut deeply into rock. The forces that drag you along are unstoppable.

I have placed the moon in the dark sky to light the scene.

Using the digital woodcut technique, I employ lines of black against white or white against black. Then I sculpt them into channels that taper, by working from one end in white and the other end in black.

Here is a close-up of the first banner, done at a high resolution.

I find it interesting to create three-dimensional forms using this kind of shading. I then employ a gel layer to add the color. Usually its just a color-by-numbers kind of approach, using Digital Airbrush. But this time, I used Just Add Water to create a continuum of color in the river, and also in the hills in the foreground. It does resemble scratchboard-watercolor, a favorite look.

The gel layer allows me to rework the color without affecting the black-and-white shading layer, of course.

Actually one layer you don't see is the sketch layer that lays underneath. It contains the original sketch, which I shade over to create the image.

Here is the sketch for the Pleiades banner. My sketch is a rough indication of what I want, but I worked on a layer directly on top of the sketch to flesh out the banner.

As you can see, the river might have been drawn as a winding road, but I thought a river to be better because of the inevitable draw of gravity as the metaphorical force of destiny on our lives.

I added the small tributary (shown in the close-up above) as another allusion to the metaphor of decisions and their effect on the course of causality.

Someday, I might put a tassel onto the banner.

Oh, and I forgot my chop marks! ;-)

Look Out Any Window

What you see depends upon where you are. But it also depends upon who you are. If you are here you will see day. If you are there, you will see night. Sometimes there is a sun, sometimes there is a moon. An ocean surrounds an island, but dry land surounds a lake.

But, hey, windows are a metaphor, right? And it is what our minds see that distinguishes us from other people. Some literal person might say that red is red no matter what and that is that. But I say that your point of view makes a huge difference.

And though the concept that red is red is strictly true within statistical perception parameters, it is also unbearably unimaginative.

This is why it is certainly good to look at the same old thing and yet have a totally new outlook. Something clicks!

Shapes are not shapes, but three-dimensional objects. Displacements in reality.

Shadows are holes in a light field.

The sky is a scattering of more blue light and the absorption of less red and green light. Oh, and I almost forgot: some air.

A hole is really a door in space through which you might reach.

Objects fall into two categories: the possible and the impossible. But all ideas are possible in our mind.

A vertex is a discontinuity in curvature. It can be the meeting of any number of faces, even one.

What happens when you cross a cube and a sphere? Is that like squaring the circle?

Though we can imagine an impossible figure, and people can make them, from one perspective, they still can't make it hook up. But our minds can.

What is magic about the pyramid's shape? It just seems like another five-sided solid. But wait, shapes are more than just shapes.

Is the inside of a solid conceptually similar to its outside? What about a torus?

Passing a polygon through a curve not lying in is plane creates a three-dimensional extrusion, like a prism. If you pass a solid through space, does it make a four-dimensional extrusion?

Dr. Seuss once said it best: if there are flashlights for when it's dark, are there flashdarks for when it's light?

Take three cylinders at right angles to each others and with centerlines passing through a single point and intersect them. What shape do you get?

I was once impressed by the Wankel engine and how a shape other than a circle still possessed a constant width when rotated. How many other kinds of shapes can do this?

If the magnetic field is uneven over the face of the earth, then what does that imply about the shape of the liquid iron core? If gravitation is uneven over the face of the earth, then what does that imply about the mass distribution internal to the earth?

What would gravitation on a torus-shaped (or a cube-shaped) world look like? And, by the way, what transmits gravity from point A to point B? Is gravity transported using the states of dark energy?

My point is that sometimes the technical and the fantastical face off and somewhere in the middle is a thing of beauty. And sometimes that thing can be a realization, a lightning bolt of discovery.

Mixing one field with another can result in the creation of something much more useful than something created for one field alone. And it all depends upon your point of view. Look out any window, but first look out through your mind's window.