April 13, 2009

chapter 16

"Beneath some paper stored for kindling beside the fireplace I found a big volume, without covers and in fine type. It contained Campanella's City of the Sun, More's Utopia, Machiavelli's Discourses and The Prince, as well as long selections from St. Simon, Comte, Marx and Engels. I don't recall what ingenious person made this collection, but it certainly was a whopper. Two days it rained, and I was sunk in it while wet wood tried to burn and I tossed in whole bundles of resinous ocote to try to make a blaze. It was too wet to fly Caligula. I stood upon the toilet seat and fed him through the hood, pushed the meat on him in order to get back as quickly as possible to the book. Utterly fascinated I was, and forgot how I sat on my bones, getting up lamed, dazed by all that boldness of assumption and reckoning." Saul Bellow


7 focus and discipline
nothing is going to get done until you do it, so sit down and get to work! organize yourself, always have a gameplan and work systematically, diligently; do one thing at a time. and do things with intensity! twyla tharp talks about habit, animators about trusting the process; in both cases it's the same: do whatever necessary to get into the zone and then respect those natural processes. you really should value, maintain and practice them, and know that when you feel like giving up, you're probably just about to learn something...



9 comments:

  1. lovely color palette

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  2. beautiful drawing! and exactly what I needed to read this morning.

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  3. awesome drawing! awesome post!!!! thaaanks!

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  4. Oh! Thanks guys! I keep wondering if anyone will bother reading this stuff, but it's good to hear that it's useful. I guess it's all stuff we already know...

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  5. I love hearing about great artists who talk about being disciplined. That it doesn't just flow out of them, and that they've got to where they are because they were dedicated and committed to their work.

    I used to work with a young artist at his first industry job. He came in and everyone was gobsmacked at his seemingly natural, effortless, prodigious talent.
    But we would have these talks where, he would tell me about how he couldn't sleep last night because he saw an Alma-Tadema painting, and he HAD to figure out how he did it so he'd get out of bed and make a study of it, into the morning. I realized he was doing this ALL of the time. He worked harder than anyone I knew.

    Anyway I kind of went off on a tangent, but I was inspired by the amount of discipline he had in him, especially at his young age.

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  6. Becca S12:33 PM

    I think I may just be about to learn something. This post helped today. Thanks.

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  7. very nice nick! i'd love to see a cartoon animated in this style.

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  8. That's a great story Bobby! Yeah, all the best people here, and all the best I've ever known are also the hardest working, despite their already immense talent. There's really no substitute for sitting down and working through problems.

    //

    Awesome Becca! I should note however, that sometimes, it also means that you just need to take a break or something! That's true too.

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  9. love the illustration! Neat blog too, thank you

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