“If anyone tells you something strange about the world, something you have never heard before, do not laugh but listen attentively, make him repeat it, make him explain it, no doubt there is something there worth taking hold off.” —Georges Duhamel

Three men gaze up at the resplendent night sky. One man looks down, makes a notation with his feather pen and says, “Gentlemen, I believe the world is round.” The man next to him gasps and runs screaming into the night, “Heretic! Heretic!” The remaining man steps up and says, “Can you tell me more?”

Leonardo da Vinci sat, pondered and sketched; comparing a bird wing to a bat wing. He did sketches in his notebook of a man suspended and then attached to wings. He looked over his shoulder, feeling that someone was there- watching. He closed his book. The year was 1490.

Centuries later two brothers, bicycle mechanics, look at Leonardo’s sketches excitedly and designed a kite. And then an airplane.

In 1865 Jules Verne wrote a novel entitled From the Earth to the Moon. Nearly 100 years later President John F. Kennedy promised that the U.S. would successfully attempt a lunar landing. This historical event occurred in 1969.

“All science fact was once science fiction,” — Ray Bradbury.

As artists/creators, we must think beyond the familiar and the known. We cannot be confined to traditional means and known techniques if we want to develop or be innovative in any meaningful way. It’s imperative to our artistic vision to be vitally alive; avoiding complacency by looking into that which we cannot see and to attempt to understand it.

It’s important to challenge what we do see because we See so little. 

We fly, we soar to the very edge of our imagination, and from there– from that new perspective– we look again to see something new; something we have never seen before? Just what are the limits of your vision?

What is it that prevents you from seeing something new?

Example: When I draw an extended forearm, I can only see that which the limit of my vision allows me to see from my singular perspective. I cannot see the raw musculature beneath the flesh; the twisting of muscle over bone. I must look beyond -even beneath- the flesh and try to understand how it works and why. I must look ever so slightly beyond the limit of my vision to understand that it is not a single line that is required to capture the shape, (though I might start there) but a series of intersecting planes that wrap around the arm as the muscles twist beneath the surface of the skin to accomplish a particular action.

Look a little bit closer. 

Closer . . .

What do you See?

Something strange?

I hope so!