Is Art a Sport?

So many charlatanesque self-help books bang on about visualisation - "Imagine what you'll look like when you're rich and famous, see the lovers hanging off your arm, the Ferrari and HumVee in your garage..." It's nausiating bullshit... But is it?

Athletes use visualisation. From seeing themselves, how they move on the field, how they'll hold themselves on the podium, how they'll scoop up a ball and pass it, how each stride will fall in a marathon. I've never been an athlete, but I've been a commuter cyclist, as well as a cycle tourist, and athletic visualisation has helped me get up at 4am, for a 5am work day start, and hammer down the main drag on 2 wheels, 5 days a week, rain, hail or shine. It's helped me visualise the downhill at the end of a climb, the big meal at the end of a 100km day. Visualisation works.

I recently discovered that I am a little bit of a graphical artist. I never was for most of my life. To quote Mel Brooks, I could "...paint the inside and outside of a house in a day! Two coats!!!" Give me a pen and paper, I could draw circuit diagrams, but rarely an image worth the waste of a pencil. Then, when dad died, and I was home in Tasmania, I rediscovered dad's retirement hobby, watercolours, then stumbled on a book at Hobart's Museum of Old and New Art (MONA), "Read This if You Want to be Great At Drawing," by Selwyn Leamy. (Laurence King Publishing, London, 2017.) Edit:- 20250301 13:52 I half filled a cheap, A5 sketchbook with sketches of Hobart and my sister's pets. It was part of my grieving for dad, trying to be like him for a while. One final act of admiration for half of the team that created me. Mum coincidentally died a few weeks later just because that was her time and my grief became focused on her. Drawing stopped and I went back to circuit diagrams and CAD software.

Meanwhile, I embarked on a model railway, an HO scale, contracted space model of the Tasman Limited, Tasmania's last ever regular passenger service. One of the engines I "need is" made of pure unobtanium, the uniquely Tasmanian, DP class rail motor. Luckily, somebody had already modelled it in CAD and I was able to get 2 bodies professionally 3D printed. Just need to paint them in the "blood and custard," 1960s TGR livery. So, I bought an airbrush kit.

First practice with the airbrush rendered this, "Abstract Garden."

I was surprised at how pleasing to the eye it was, so I gave it to my wife as part of her birthday gift. However, until I saw her reaction to it, I frankly didn't value it. She LOVED it! She has an eye, she has strong standards for beauty. She's not a graphic artist, but she is a collector of many and varied prints and her late mother was an accomplished watercolourist - Linda can be a harsh, if fair, critic, and has been. She knows how to tell things like they are when she needs to. And she absolutely loved my random study in miniature, intended solely for me to get used to handling an airbrush.

Do I think it's art? No. It is nice, espcially now that I've seen it through Linda's eyes, but I wouldn't call it more than a study. That was it's purpose, learning how to control the strokes of an airbrush. But it made me wonder, could I do a work of art? I went back over my sketchpad from 2020, looking to see what I'd done. Page 1 looked "primitive" and forced, page 2 looked more formed and deliberate but was still shaky. Just pencil on paper, nothing "artistic", just the emergence of workman-like sketches of things around me. Then there was a sketch of sailing dinghy on the Derwent River, dran from an extreme blowup of a digital photo I took from dad's bedroom window on the day my sister and I emptied his room.

The sketch inspired me to buy a canvas and some acrylics but, by the time I got it home, I didn't have the confidence to try to paint the lines of "Moth on a Windy Day" (the sailing dinghy sketch), but I did have an idea born of memories of all day boating with dad and my uncle. The result was this, "Coming Home Late."

This is literally the first ever "representation" graphic artwork I have ever been willing to show in public. I'll let that sink in. This is an act of courage on my part. I feel naked and exposed, even on a blog that probably has no readers. This completed work feels to me so exposing that I gave it to my "non-residential partner" (AKA "girlfriend" I live in a polycule of 4, distributed across Australia's newly largest city) rather than hang it at home. Let me stress again, I've never considered myself capable of graphic arts and I see flaws everywhere in this work. Yet, my non-residential partner loves it. It was hurried, even paniced, in its execution, it's imperfect, it's rough. Yet hate its execution as much as I do, I will bear it here, as the surprise to me that I could execute it at all is actually greater than my cringe. I show it to illustrate the process...

I visualised this for days. I stressed about having wasted money on art supplies all while I was haunted by the imagination of this image before I even pencilled a horizon line on the canvas. My art is songwriting and arrangement. My technique is recording. I'm not a graphic artist, I'm not even a very good draftsman and a bit crap at CAD - I code primatives in OpenSCAD, a python-like CAD programming language, I don't even draw with a mouse on a screen! Then I "vomited" this onto the canvas in 4 hours.

And my girlfriend loves it. Even in its imperfections, because art is, apparently, imperfect.

The thing I take from this is visualisation. The thing that gets me is that, while I have used visualisation to work out arrangements in terms of track layouts in an audio recorder, I've used it to see the end of today's road on a bicycle adventure, I have never before been able to render an image of any quality from an image in my mind. The sketchbook in 2020 was working through the course in my copy of that drawing book, following instructions, I don't recall visualising, in fact what I recall was analysis, over analysis.

I do love that sketchbook, but more because it was one last act of understand my dad's creativity, an emotional/creative side to his crisp, engineering and structural skills. His watercolours are tiny treasures. His doodled woodworking plans show an artist's touch, they're not simply draftsmanship. Even his technical drawings, from railway engineering drawing from his career with TGR, to his home renovation sketches he submitted to local councils, his signature is bold and artistic. His pen strokes have flare. He was at ease with visualisation, then realising it on paper, then in the family home and at work, rehabilitation Tasmania's aging three foot six narrow guage rail. I realise now, he was an artist first. I thing he probably left behind in the UK, when he moved to Australia forever.

I'm a tech nerd because of dad, and a guitarist because of mum, although I discovered while learning guitar as a kid, dad was also a skiffle guitarist! I looked at his drawings and felt I could never equal his precision. I was quickly a better guitarist than he was, probably because he'd had to leave his guitar behind more than ten years before, I realise now. I'm an artist because of guitar and an audio/electronics tech/tape-op because I wound up folling mum into a media career, but I'm retired and tinkering because of dad's engineering career. In in the 5 years since dad's passing, I've discovered what a "renaissance man" he was, a master of many arts, crafts and trades. I now realise that he visualised everything, saw it in his head and perfected it there before executing a drawing and building the thing.

I resisted visualisation because, coming of age in the 80s, I dismissed the snake oil of capitalist "self iimprovement." That era was full of snake oil and resistance to it. And those of us on one side have been held back by not using what was good from the idea of visualisation of a desired outcome. Is this why the right runs rings around the left?