Images Above and Below: Journal & sketchbook art by Marc Carson

Drawing for me is more like “drawing it out.” Always has been. People ask me sometimes,

“who is it?”

Like, who did you set out to draw?

I have no idea. It drew itself.

That person or thing just came out of the page. My art is just me trying to celebrate that birth, to highlight it.

To show that nothing can become something, maybe.

Such irrationality—in the Jungian sense of “attending to the perception of a non-average emergence”—that’s a big part of what makes me, me.

Let it come out of the page. Then we will make it into something.

My blog posting method works much the same way. Start with anything. Save. Edit. Save. Edit. Save. Now it is something. Before, it wasn’t. I don’t recognize it, in the sense that I didn’t set out to make, it.

In between posts I worry—is this it? No more anything to share? But the truth is, it was never a thing. It was always a what. Typing that first sentence is like writing down a question: What are you? What is this about?

At work, my coaching method works much the same way. Clients tell me it turns into something they didn’t anticipate, in a good way; there’s this “I thought you were just a personality type guy” moment after we’ve done 1) solving problems together and 2) relating them back as far into the fabric of the universe as we can go, after we’ve gone full them, and that’s a unique outcome that I’m happy about, and I’m happy mostly for them.

For me it’s easily perceived as another sketch, another perception filled out. Worth doing. Fun to look back at later. A person who to me started out as a splotch on the page, a blurry orb, is now this unique thing. A thing with presence, strength, its own system, its own integrity, even purpose. Or at least—a new heading, a new direction and confidence. They know it, I know it. It’s good.

Others ask me, “why the blue pencil in your ear, in the photo up there? Are you supposed to look like an artist?” I haven’t talked to them about this other art thing yet; I had just finished a marathon drawing session when I took that photo, and I was proud of what I had accomplished.

Society can be rough, in this way, for those of us who treasure life’s dimensionality. Why do I have to have all this stuff in different drawers? To talk as if I do this, not that, and justify it if I do both? I like here-place’s “INTJ Blog”-ness in this way. It’s all just me; the reason is in there somewhere if you want to dig around.

Shout out to dscript.org

Filed in: Aesthetics /4/ | Sensation /40/ | Se /25/ | Ni /42/ | Therapeutic Practice /144/ | Intuition /62/