Although I have always drawn, my first formal education in design and the visual arts was completely centered around the use of AutoCAD software. Although I am thankful for the knowledge I know possess in CAD, I now see my education thus far as quite detrimental to the development of my free-hand drawing abilities. See, with CAD, your drawing is finite and for the most part perfection is attainable and can be achieved after a concerted effort. It was if I had become addicted to only creating perfected drawings. When I moved on to free-hand drawing and realized that the perfection I sought to obtain was beyond my skill level, my artistic confidence was crushed. I viewed every drawing of mine, no matter how important, as something that would be critiqued and reviewed and in some ways I still do. I do believe I possess a trait Yo-Yo Ma described as thinking with your hands. I have strong conceptual thoughts on ideas that I should try to immediately express onto paper but instead I place the pages of my journals and sketchbooks on a sacred pedestal and am afraid to tarnish them with sketches and instead do drawings (very rarely do I do a drawing in less than 10 minutes that I am at all satisfied with) that take so long for my mind to comfortably develop that if I actually end up deciding to put on paper, my original inspiration is now a withered diluted remnant of the once promising idea. I am envious of the likes of Frank Gehry, who can do a quick seemingly unassuming sketch, but when applied to its later context (like the finished building) it is such a beautifully clear representation of the idea. I believe that the ideas expressed above are the design world’s representation of the philosophical belief of “live in the moment”. When a person can put their idea down on paper immediately after its conception, no matter the quality of the drawing, that is when they achieve the purest and coincidentally the most perfected form of that idea.

The Modulor Man