1. Processing abstract information
2. Finding the limit of my thoughts

So I had figured out that I talk to myself to solve abstract problems. I figured that since the behavior has a purpose there should be a natural border. Some place to stop talking.

BTW When I say I’m talking to myself that’s not completely true. In my fantasy I’m having a discussion with some one who is an interested party in the problem I’m trying to solve.
I tell him the story of the problem plus every solution I’ve found up till now.
Sometimes I get stuck and I will repeat the same few sentences over and over for hours. Sometimes even for days.
You can imagine how annoying that can get.

It took me a while but I finally found out that there is actually a very obvious answer to this question.
For me the whole world is connected. Every problem is connected to every other problem - I’m told that this has either something to do with being autistic or with having a visual thought process - So when I start analysing some problem I can’t stop because the problem goes on and on.

But I can greatly reduce the number of problems I have to solve if I simply apply the rule that every problem I solve has to improve my life.
So Dutch unemployment crisis, as interesting it might be, is not something I should be thinking about. Same holds true for the famine in Africa.
But Promen’s (my employer) embezzlement of reimbursement of travelling expenses is a problem I should try to solve. Not only because it is costing me money. But there’s the simple matter of people doing what they are supposed to do. I should follow the rules and so should upper management. (What can I say. I’m autistic. People acting the way there supposed to, is more important to me then money )
(More about this when I’ve solved it.)

So I’ve been living by this rule for a few days and it helps.
A bit.
After a few days I found that even when I limited myself to problems that actually influence my live. I still spend a lot of time talking to myself.

Turns out that I’m somewhat impatience.
When I run into a problem I tend to think about it until I’ve found the first 10 solutions. Then I implement the first solution.
But instead of waiting to find out if the solution works I continue thinking about new solutions. Which is a waste of time because the first one usually works.

But some times it doesn’t. Some problems are a little more complicated. Like the problems with my embezzling employer. And that is when I run into the real problem.
Turns out the there is no logic in the way I solve problems. Possible solutions come at random intervals.
There’s no way of knowing if I’ve found every solution or whether there are still a few more.
And as I said sometimes I get stuck and repeat the same few sentences over and over again.
Sometimes I follow a train of though to it’s bitter end. Only to find that it wouldn’t work.

And then I stop.

And I have no idea whether I stop because I’ve reached the end of a school of thought. Or the end of a series of solutions.
Or just stop because I don’t feel like thinking abstract anymore.

The thing is that if I stop because I’ve reached the end of the school of thought or the end of the series of solutions. It would imply that I do know how many solutions I might expect.
If that’s the case it stands to reason that me getting stuck has more to do with my own annoyance then with my thinking process.

To Be Continued…

The idea was for one leaf on the sidewalk. But to make it more interesting I wanted to change the size of the tiles. I spend a few days thinking about the best size for the tiles (and being busy with other things). But when I finally had time to make the drawing I couldn’t.
It felt as though something was wrong but I could put my finger on it.

After a boring day of playing computer games I realized that I had made a mistake in the design and had no problem drawing it.

Lines and leaf

Probably you’ll have seen what the problem is.
These kind of tiles they use on the sidewalk have a fixed size of about 25 * 25 centimeters. And everybody knows that.

As an artist I am allowed to change reality in any way I feel will make my drawing more interesting.
But the trick is not to be caught. Since everybody knows the size of sidewalk tiles the leaf will seem very large.

I have thought of an other design using both a sidewalk and leafs. But that’s for the next drawing.

Commenting this and my last drawing
Although it’s not really a problem with this drawing. Again I had a problem drawing the right side and the left side of the leaf symmetrical.
In this case it’s not really a problem because I shaded and it seems as though part of the leaf is lifted from the ground.

I realized that the problem is that I’m not very good in drawing curves that run from right to left. So I’m tempted to start with the curve running from left to right. Which usually is the right curve. (I turned the paper to draw the leaf). Then when I try to draw the left curve my hand covers the right curve and I can’t see what I’m doing.

Might be a good idea to start with the left curve and see how it goes.

The goal in doing EyeSee was to test the theory that putting interesting features on specific lines would trap the eye of the audience in a circular motion.
But although I did like the drawing I didn’t feel that my eyes were trapped.

It wasn’t until after I had posted the drawing that I realized that the problem was with the background.
As in. There is no background.

The point is not to draw attention to features on specific lines. The point is to help the audience find interesting features in the drawing by guiding there eyes.
For instance a row of trees in a landscape could guide the eye to a few interesting houses. Or interestingly colored clouds could guide the eye to a mountain range.

1. Processing abstract information
2. Finding the limit of my thoughts

In my last post I wrote that I expected that post would be a little further apart in future. This one is taking even more time then I had expected.

On the up side I have figured out that my very annoying habit of talking to myself is actually a symptom of my autism.
Having a visual thinking process means that I can’t think about subjects I can’t visualize. Things like “feelings”, the word “goals”, “business deals” are to abstract to visualize.
I’m not able to think about them except by talking about them.

Accepting that this is a symptom of my autism means a few things.

1. It means that I have to accept that I will never get rid of this habit.
2. It means that I’ll have to accept that I can’t draw as much as I would want to. Because I can’t think visual at the same time that I’m processing abstract information.
3. But it also means that I need a better understanding of this process. There must be a natural boundary. A point where I’ve solved the problem I’m working on and should go back to thinking visually. That’s what I’m working on right now.

An immigrant’s son starts a business. Kind of a fish and chips shop (although in the Netherlands we don’t eat fish with our chips).
This is very special. Most immigrant’s son (and daughters) are unemployed. Some are getting their degrees.
A few (male) immigrants have their own tailor shop. But I know of only 3 or 4 entrepreneurial immigrant’s sons.

Although his shop is down the road from where I live I hardly ever go there. I don’t eat as much chips as I used to. When I go there it’s usually on odd hours and I’m the only customer. Which is nice because it gives me the change to talk a little with him.
He’s clearly very proud of his business and rightly so.

Last Thursday I didn’t feel like cooking and I went down to his shop to buy me some chips and fried meat. He was serving a few customers so I had to wait for a while. Which gave me the opportunity to watch him work.

I noticed a few strange things.
First I saw him watering his satay sauce down. I must say that I never seen anybody do that.
At first I thought he did it because the sauce had gotten too dry but soon I found that he was running out of sauce. Which is very bad timing on his part. But he commented that it’s something that could happen to anybody.
Then I noticed him running through his shop to get some meat out of the fridge.
When it finally was my turn I realized that he had taken as much time to serve three customers as most (fish and) chips sellers need to serve a dozen customers.

So while I was waiting for my bag of chips I wondered why there was such a gap between his and mine impression of his business. But it wasn’t until I started thinking about how I could explain it to him that I realized the problem.

Because he’s an immigrant’s son it’s not PC to comment on his business. He could think that you were actually commenting on the color of his skin.
So nobody ever does.
And if nobody ever comments on the way you do your business you must be doing a very good job.

So there it is. The story about one thing I learned while waiting for chips.

If you’ve ever read any advise on how you should go about writing a blog you’ll know that titles are very important.
If you want to become popular you should at least publish a few stories about things you’ve learned and the more cheesy the title the better.

But I don’t want to become popular. Or actually I do, but not in that way.
So I was planning to file this story away as something funny I couldn’t use in my blog. But the story kept bugging me.
This morning I realized why.

I’m in the same boat as this immigrant’s son. Apart from a few trolling art teachers (who are willing to give me a thousand boring exercises if I only turn control of this weblog over to them), I get hardly any criticism.
People tell me that I’m talented and how much they like me telling about my life. But as nice as it is to get compliments you don’t learn anything from them. You learn from criticism.
Which means that I’ll have to criticize myself.

Thinking about this, and some other problems I’ve run into, I realized that this will impact the way I write my blog.
I never aspired to be a day painter because I think that day painters let the need to publish daily trump the quality of their work. But this will probably mean that I post even less then I’ve done up till now.

The decision to criticize myself defines me as an artist: I’m not a blogger who draws but a drawing artist who blogs.
This means that I’m going to break every rule out of the blogging rule book.

In this blog I’m writing an account of my journey to become a better artist.
I’ll do that the way that feels best to me. I won’t be posting regularly. Sometimes I might be gone for a few days (or even weeks) if that is what I need.
You’re welcome to join my journey (rss feed).
But it is my journey!
No compromises.

I came across this old video by Derek and The Dominos and it reminded me how times have changed and how I have changed.
Music has become very important. Nowadays I watch a lot of music videos looking for suitable songs to post on twitter.
In my youth music wasn’t that important. Although my radio played a lot of tunes I never listened to them. I was always reading or doing something else while the radio played.

Only sometimes when there was a really beautiful song on the radio, would I actually listen.
So it took me years to realize that the kind of boring song that runs till 3 min 24 sec and the really beautiful instrumental bit that starts at 3 min 25 sec are actually the same song.