The Traveling Eye, part 2

Winter has been long this year.  We’ve had it easy, no big blizzards or anything, but the arrival of Spring has been in slo-mo.  I keep thinking a vacation would be nice, but everyone else in the continental US seems to be having worse weather than here, so I’ve decided what I’m really looking for is a change of scene. There are a few tenets to the benefits of travel that get iterated often, precisely because they are so true.  One is that when you go to new places, you get to explore a new you.  Wherever you go, there you are, but who you are can depend a lot on your environs.

The second is that it summons new creativity, because you see new places and meet new people and explore new things.  It’s impossible to not be inspired by all that novelty.

But there’s another great benefit, if not to travel exactly, then to placing yourself in different scenes.  And that’s to your eyesight.  I’ve become uncomfortably aware lately how routine my focus fields have become.  Entirely too much of my sight-time is devoted to viewing about 18 inches in front of me, staring into a computer screen.  I suspect that’s true for a lot of people.  The added challenge of this is that the concentrated glow of the LED screen reinforces the 2-dimensional nature of what I’m looking at, and does a lot to negate any artistic enjoyment out of what I’m seeing.

Also true for many people, is routinely seeing to about 3 cars length in front of you, while moving quickly.  That’s a detrimental vision habit too, artistically speaking, as it forces you to take only a surface read of what you’re seeing.  Swapping keen observation for safety is fine while driving, but when the habit carries into the rest of your day, you lose a lot of detail potential.

Even a regular walking route can build vision habits that lose more that you gain.  In my many years of walking to the el or bus stop to get anywhere when I lived in the city, it was so easy to zone out on those walks, especially if I was tired, that I often based what I saw on the assumption of what I should see, rather than what was there.  Many times I would pass a shop front and suddenly realize a new business was there, only to wonder when the heck did that happen?  Where was I, in the dozens of times I passed by and didn’t see a change?

I’m bringing some sight-changes into my life.  Here’s a simple exercise I did, from the comfort of my favorite recliner!  The living room wall of my apartment is all glass, with a giant patio door.  I look out all of the time to this lovely treeline.  But my habit is to flatten it into a single view, rather than really look into the whole depth of that space.  So I decided to use the clear acetate left over from my hanging orb project. I trimmed it into about 3″ squares, and then took the time to explore different depth fields of this patio view I am so accustomed to.  I made simple sketches with Sharpies on each acetate square, then layered them to complete the scene.

I want to continue this method as a style of sketchbook, because the materials travel well and the sketching I do is not complicated – I am not looking to create a photo-realistic final image.  The main thing, is my eyes feel better when I consciously explore these depths of field.  It is a refreshing way to take a journey, without having to travel far.

Here are my daily visitors, who merited a layer of my sketch.