Gare's non-Xara Art

[Gare]

Oh, I truly hope your last line was tongue-in-cheek, Frank. Yeah, I've been putting ideas down on paper since I was age 6, but it's not how I make my living. I'm a career author, and I try in each of the 25 books I've written in the past 20 years to make the point that the execution of an idea shows a lot of different things: style, technique, technical prowess, use of color, perspective, and so on.

But if there is no idea, or a poor one, behind the execution of artwork, ultimately it fails. I'm always initially intrigued by "high gloss" artwork, probably because as a race, we are all subliminally attracted to bright, shiny things. But it lacks sustaining power, like so much fast food, and ultimately it doesn't nourish a person's soul. You can't embrace "Flash artwork"; you can't learn from it when there's no concept driving it, it's just really nice wallpaper in the end.

Bear with me now: art...painting, drawing, whether it's with physical media or digital...is an avenue of self-expression. So is music, theater, dance, it's all self-expression and even Albert Einstein concluded that it's something Mankind can't live without.

Now me? I teach Art, and I've always told people that technique (skill, whatever you call it) can be taught and learned over time. Computers are simply (!) calculating machines. I use them to calculate where a highlight should go optically, or to repeat a pattern 1,000, but my computer has never created artwork. It's "concept" people need to work on, a mental muscle that takes inspiration from all around us, twists and re-interprets it, and gives birth to a new graphical idea.

I am more proud of a "student" who had become an Idea Factory, but currently lacks finesse in their execution of these ideas, than I am of someone who can reproduce a photograph using all vector paths.

Get it? One person has become a really good Xerox machine, and the other thinks for a living.

When I'm lucky enough to have the spare time to draw, I savor it, and reach into my bag where I keep ideas that need realization, and then choose my tools that I feel are the most appropriate to create the idea, and offer the least resistance. I reach for Xara a lot of times, but not all the time, and I'd ask everyone who reads this to think about that for a moment. It's really, honestly, sincerely, saying a lot about Xara. A quick check of my hard drives shows that I have 24,000 Xara drawings, and 37,000 modeling files, created using at least 7 different programs over the past 19 years.

If you're into statistics, that's pretty close, eh?

Enjoy your Friday, everyone!

My Best,

Gary