Took an airplane today for a wedding tomorrow. Cool weather, brisk tides.There's a band for a different wedding in the ballroom next door right now: hard to form thoughts over the drums. Anyhow, on the plane I ended up drawing, a bit of life drawing. Drawing in public makes a lot of people nervous but my feeling is: what's the worst they can do? Mock you, say it sucks?–well then, we're in agreement! Anyhow, it's far more interesting to watch people turn out crappy drawings then have them be timid and silent in public. I'd like to see more people do this kind of thing.

And nobody's ever approached me to see my drawings–until now! First time I'd life drawn in months. The flight attendant said 'how's it coming?' I'd been found out! And then it was praised six ways over and shown to the rest of the crew. I reckon a lot of people are more afraid of praise then criticism. They're just words, you know. Turns out she went to art school and used to draw herself. She also said, and I imagine this is the crux of the praise, that it's nice to see people draw–really anything that's not electronic. Everybody's on their electronics, so she doesn't see people doing things like drawing, or reading books or newspapers often anymore. I'd agree with that...and yet here we are.

In any case, I'd like to let all reluctant sketchers know being found out once in a while isn't a wholly bad thing. It makes you think "Crap! Now I've gotta try to make this good." Like jogging in a group, I think it makes you go a little further than you might've otherwise.

The counterweight to that effusiveness is the acknowledgement that praise can be poisonous. It externalizes your personal motive and gives you a false sense of capability. Each action should justify itself. Is it wrong to motivate people, then? I don't know. I do think motivation should be internal, inherent. The journey is forever, eh?

Evidently, there are some serious perspective issues. Instead of working them out, I rushed to make it more 'presentable' by the end of the flight. Ah, my counterweight.