I spent last weekend in rainy (normally sunny) Southern California. During this trip, I managed to corral the kids into going to the Academy Awards Museum. There, we came across a set of drawings from the original Disney animated film The Little Mermaid (Figure 1). From what I could deduce from the drawings, I believe they are what are called key frames. In animation, the artists draw key frames, which represent different transitions in the animation and are then passed onto other artists who fill in the frames between the keys. As I described what these frames were for to my kids (and a random onlooker), I discovered mentally why I'm fascinated with such works. I'm fascinated by them because they're unfinished. I find that these artifacts of the creative process give me insights into the mind of the artist creating them.
I love the rough drawings, erasure marks, rough lines, and all the things that show how the artist works. This took me back to another museum visit.
Last year I was lucky enough to attend an exhibition of the works of Keith Haring at the Broad Museum in downtown Los Angeles. I've been a follower of Keith's work for decades now and don't miss any chance to see collected exhibits of his work. This exhibit stood out to me as I saw works and materials he'd used that I'd never read about or witnessed. I saw full blown murals painted on camping tarps (yes, camping tarps like you can buy at Walmart), I saw street posters, statues, and other paintings from his extensive set of works. One of these works stood out to me. Figure 2 is an image of an unfinished work started not soon before his untimely death. I spent time studying the image, looking at it from different angles and vantage points. I tried to picture Keith working on this painting in his studio in the flow of artistic creativity. This image took me into a creative flow state. All from an unfinished painting.
For some reason, I've always loved works from artists that are incomplete works versus completed works. This is my inner creator coming out. It takes me back to the earliest parts of my career where I was the “lone wolf” developer/network admin for a small resort in Central Oregon. This was back in the late 80s when there was no internet like we have now. There were no GitHub repositories, no code blogs, no www.stackoverflow.com. Nope. There were crappy 1200 or 2400 baud modems by which we reached out into the world to gather our knowledge from forums like CompuServe and Genie. It was the dark ages. LOL.
So being the fresh-faced coder, how could I learn to better my craft? I did this several ways. I read every book I could get my hands on, I went to the “big” city of Portland where I discovered knowledge heaven in the form of Powell books, and, finally, I read every computer magazine I could get my hands on. The articles that I really took a liking to were the ones where the authors explained the process of how they achieved a solution. Using art as a metaphor, they took me through the rough drawings, pencil sketches, rough demos, base coats, detail work, and finally, a finished working solution. I was watching techno artists take me through their process from unfinished to finished work. This is my process to this day.
Many of the unique solutions I've built over the years come from a process like this one. I'm tasked with seeing if an idea might work. For instance, many years ago, I was tasked with building a solution where we embedded code in Microsoft Word documents that gave users the ability to create dynamic scripts for call centers. I started this process to see if I could embed code into a work document. This was my rough sketch. I then took the output from that document and built an HTML-based script using the metadata embedded in the document, another sketch. I then combined these two together into a rough demonstration for the client. The client liked what they saw, and we went through the process repeatedly until we had a good working solution. This code lasted nearly 10 years until a new solution was implemented. It enjoyed many years of success, all originating from a rough sketch of code.
This process has worked for me time and time again. I love just trying stuff to see if it works. If it does, I file it away for future use; if not, I look at other solutions. I'm always experimenting, always sketching, always creating unfinished paintings.
