ipad3 photos on Flickr

My newest book that I'm reading now, which is mostly Glaser's pictures that he put in a particular sequence of related pairs on facing pages -- for example, the two that I've included here. The kind of thinking his book is intended to stimulate seems to be (obviously) primarily a heighted visual awareness. (This was published in 2008, but I only heard about it recently and my copy arrived yesterday.)

If you're interested in Glaser's work and ideas then you might like to watch this interview:

Milton Glaser: Certainty Is A Closing Of The Mind

September 18th, 2013 -- 45 minutes

www.goodlifeproject.com/milton-glaser/

If that's more than you want to know or it's too slow for you, here are two other much shorter videos about Glaser:

vimeo.com/11577085 [6 minutes]

www.ted.com/speakers/milton_glaser.html [15 mins 14secs]

Here is some of what Glaser says at the beginning of the book, before all the pictures (from page 17 of the interview on pages 10-22):

"My assumption is that we build up a reservoir of preconceived ideas about everything, which becomes the basis for our lives. And then, every once in a while, perhaps through meditation or through art, we see freshly and without the encumbrances of our own history. That's what my fascination with drawing is, for one thing, but also to make connections and comparisons between creating art and the experience of mediation. To me this doesn't seem fanciful at all." [Yes, that was "the experience of mediation", not meditation -- it wasn't a typo in the book or in my copying it.]

...

"The fact is that we develop immunity to experience, because we have to, because if we responded to everything in life, we could not tolerate it. Most of our lives we spend deflecting most of the information we receive. You go out in the street and you are besieged just by what your sight, your hearing, your mind encounter. People stop paying attention; they revert to cruise control. Every once in a while something will happen, like somebody dies, or you have an accident, or you see a great painting, and you realize that you are living in a semiconscious state. In fact, that may be the only way humans can cope with the complexity of life."

"What paintings do, and theater does, and what poetry does, is to penetrate people's immunity and to embrace the puzzles to be solved. ..."

The picture of Glaser in this collage (or mosaic) was cropped from a frame in the 45 minute interview.

Something that seems odd to me that I don't have a good explanation for is that here in Tallahassee neither the public library nor Florida State University's libraries have either this book or Glaser's most important previous two books. My wild guess is that maybe the fine arts departments at FSU think Glaser is way too much of a commercial artist to be worth noticing. However, the FSU business school is much bigger and I would expect some of their teachers and students to request the book be added to the library collections. For at least a couple decades many big, expensive volumes about graphic design were bought (before I retired I cataloged several of them). Or maybe FSU faculty, staff, and students have simply become so focused on electronic resources that they no longer look very carefully for worthwhile printed books to buy and may now have a much smaller budget for such old fashioned formats. It doesn't surprise me that Drawing is Thinking and Glaser's other books are available only as printed books.

This I made for a little kid who had difficult time back in the day. His mom later told me that the kid really liked this dog. #digitalpainting #digitalart #procreate #myart #backintheday #digitalartist #procreateapp #ipad #ipad3 #comicbookartist #des by Jaakko Talvitie