I’m reading this book. I started it probably around a year ago, reading parts of it at different times and then putting it away. Thoughts inspired by this book helped me formulate the reasons for leaving my old job. There is much in it to think about for every ‘knowledge worker’. On the other hand, I was always aware of the fact that many of these crafty professions the author admires are almost entirely male-dominated and could be very hostile to the rare women who attempt to venture into this world. This is often cited as one of the reasons why girls try hard in academic subjects – most professions that are open to them without academic education are extremely low-paid, exhausting and otherwise unattractive.
As a teenager I had a dream to own a vintage Soviet car that I could take apart and put back together myself, like my uncle used to do with his first Zaporozhets. Yet I would have never had the courage that the author of this book had, to seek out experienced mechanics and get them to teach me something. Let alone in parallel with doing a PhD in Philosophy. Courage is something they should teach in primary school.There were a few paragraphs in the book on drawing. The author remembered his drawing teacher placing a skeleton horizontally and thus busting his pupils’ preconceptions on how a skeleton is supposed to stand. There are many intuitive parallels between drawing and crafts.
My drawing teacher says I’m too attentive to detail, and this is the reason why I rarely finish a drawing on time. He says I need to become ‘rough’ to learn to draw better. Nonetheless, this time he said that a ‘sensitive’ approach was appropriate for drawing this Apollo.
Apollo drawing