Thinking with my pen

In preparation for going back to finish my undergraduate degree, I took three semesters at Laney College, the community college in Oakland CA.  (By the way, children, did you know that public schools really used to be public?  When I went to Laney in the late 80s, they charged an enrollment fee of $25 per semester plus tuition of $5 per credit hour up to a maximum of $50.  So I could take four classes a semester at a real college for $75.)  My original undergrad adventure ten years earlier had given me nearly no prerequisites for architecture, so I had courses in freehand drawing, design principles, studio architecture, architectural history, and so on. 

In my design principles course, I met a young man who was one of those guys who grew up drawing, the same way that some kids grew up reading or playing hockey or singing.  He just did it, all the time, since he was a little boy.  So I was entranced, not merely by the quality of the work that he did, but also by the creativity of it.  He was thinking with his pencil.  He told me that he wanted to go into fabric design.  And I thought, for the first time, of every shirt I'd ever owned, and the plaids and the stripes and the floral patterns and the textures, and realized that every single line was a decision by someone like my friend.  It was a revelatory moment.

I didn't enjoy architecture school at Berkeley because I kept trying to design buildings that fulfilled their social responsibilities.  I didn't let myself explore as much as the other students because I couldn't imagine creating a multi-million dollar object that was merely intellectual.  And that killed my interest in drawing for many years. 

But now I go to meetings.  Some of them are useful, many are not.  And the unproductive meetings have become the source of a lot of really interesting drawings, which Nora has started to collect.  Not representational drawings, but explorations of pattern, often launched by me taking one of my rings and using it as a template to draw a circle.

So when it came time to take my mom's diamond up to Edie Armstrong at Folia Gallery to design a ring around it, she and I just stood at the counter in the store and both drew and talked and drew and walked around looking at her other designs and drew some more.  I was there for about 90 minutes.  She said, "It's unusual for someone to actually work with me on their design."  More often, they have something already in mind, or they see one of her existing rings and ask her to more or less copy that.

A few days later, she sent me six sketches based on our conversations.  They're very cool, worth framing on their own terms.  I chose the one I liked best and used it as the grounds for my own new design, which I sent back.  And that's where we're headed. 

It's been fun to use that part of my head again.