my high school art teacher once gave me a fantastic piece of advice, when faced with an incomprehensible piece of art. we'd been talking about children's artwork, especially the scribbling stage of art, like so: he advised saying, 'tell me about your picture,' instead of asking, 'what is it?'... when i hear someone tell me that they can't draw at all, or that they can only draw stick figures, i ask them when they stopped trying to draw.... one thing i've noticed about non-artists looking at art is that they feel intimidated by it, because they think it's something they can't do, because they never worked on improving their skill; or they didn't go to art school, or take art history courses, so they feel like they lack the vocabulary to talk about art. when really, all that's required is a bit of thought.

this morning didn't go particularly well; i woke up when my first alarm went off, then promptly fell back asleep, and managed to somehow ignore the second alarm going off three times. i woke up at 6:08, then flew out of the house and got in the car, with no coffee, and began the two-hour drive to work… where i discovered i'd left my office keys 55 miles away, back at my house.... in it, he wrote, "There are two kinds of books I find intolerable - the ones that show you how to draw animals or humans by starting with a series of ovals and parallelograms and the art books that are filled with overlays scarring famous paintings, mapping out the purportedly arcane secrets of composition and golden sections."