I was sitting on the floor of a small home in Kolkata, northern India, where I’d be staying for the next three months. I had my tabla ready in front of me.
I had no idea what to expect. Jayanta, my new tabla teacher, had just seated himself opposite me. He didn’t speak a word of English. I didn’t speak a word of Bengali.
He gestured for me to play.
I’d been having regular lessons in the UK for two years, I’d been practising pretty diligently. So whilst I was nervous, I was also looking forward to showing him that I wasn’t a complete newbie. I played.
After a few seconds, he winced and raised his hand to stop me. He looked like I’d insulted him.
He took a long look at me, said forcefully, “Na!” and hit the tabla once with the index finger of his right hand. Effortlessly. The walls rang with the sound.
There are seven sounds you make with your fingers on a set of tabla. They’re combined to make incredibly complex rhythms which sometimes don’t repeat for many beats. Rhythmically, Indian classical music is much more complex than western classical music.
“Na” is the most basic sound of tabla. It’s like a word, the first one you learn. You make it by snapping your index finger down and hitting the rim of the tabla. Done right, it rings.
He said “Na” and gestured to me again. I did my “Na”. It was more of a soft, fluffy “ping”. He shook his head and hit his “Na” again. Again, the walls rang.
Then he left me alone to work on my “Na”.
As uncomfortable and humbling as that experience was, I think of it now as one of the pivotal moments in my life. It has affected how I approach any kind of learning. When I’m trying to develop pretty much any complex skill, I work on my “Na”.
Working on my “Na”
I practice drawing pretty much the same way as a musician practices.
Most people approach improving their drawing and painting by drawing and painting. It seems obvious, right? And that will work, probably. But for most people, it’s a really inefficient way to improve.
A much more efficient way is to take out a specific skill, even a specific part of a specific skill, and practice it repeatedly until it improves. To work on your Na.
Then, when you come to perform, the walls will ring.
My daily practice routine
So every morning, at the beginning of each working day in the studio, I work on my na.
First, I warm up with an exercise I call breathing lines. It’s pretty simple. I get a charcoal pencil and I draw a bunch of easy, slow, straight, parallel lines. I’m not drawing anything, I’m just warming up. Feeling the contact between the charcoal and the paper.
After this, I do an exercise from a superb drawing skills program available from Ani Art Academy, The Language of Drawing called “origin – destination”.
A line has to start somewhere and it has to end somewhere. This exercise entails marking a series of random dots on the paper and then joining them with as straight and controlled a line as you possibly can. It’s much harder than it looks! Try it.
Once I’ve done two or three of those, I do another exercise from the same program called shape replication. This is kind of like a simplified version of sight size. The way I do this is to draw a square, subdivide it with three lines using a ruler, and then draw out another square the same size and attempt to replicate the divisions free hand. Again, harder than it looks. Try it 🙂
If you draw your original squares on a clear acetate sheet (use OHP slide pens) you can then lay your original over your copy to see how close you’ve come. This feedback is really invaluable in helping you improve and gauge your progress. Especially if you’re learning by yourself.
All this takes me about an hour, maybe a little more. It’s not too much out of my day, and it guarantees me that every day, I develop or at the very least maintain some basic drawing skills. I’m just working on my “Na”.
What do you hope to gain?
Someone once asked me this when I posted an image from my practice on facebook. It’s a reasonable question. I assume the inclusion of the word “hope” infers that the poster wasn’t convinced there was much much point to what I was doing, or at least was a little bemused by it.
If you’re used to think about just drawing or painting stuff to improve your skills, then I guess it does look a little odd at first. Well, here’s what I get from it:
- Firstly, I get a sense of achievement from it. Every day, and that’s not to be sniffed at.
- Secondly, and perhaps most importantly, I know I’ve developed my skills. By a minuscule amount, yes, but over years, over a lifetime, those minuscule amounts add up to something big.
- I also get the knowledge that I’m moving forwards. Even if I don’t paint on a given day, I know I’m not lapsing. I’m still working on maintaining my basic skills. I’m still improving my “Na”.
The one thing I don’t get though, is anything worth showing. What I end up with on my paper is tracks in the snow. A record that I showed up and practiced, and perhaps an indication of whether I did better than usual today or not.
No one would even consider questioning a violinist about why they practise basic scales and intonation to improve their technique. Because everyone knows that they’re doing it so that when they come to perform, they will have the skills that they need at their fingertips.
I believe that it’s the same for any complex skill, and that certainly includes drawing and painting.
A lot of the time, I don’t really feel like doing it, although I enjoy it once I’ve started. One thing that helps me on the days when I’m struggling to get started is to remember Jayanta sitting across from me. I remember his disdain.
And I get to work on my “Na”.
Just in case it’s useful to see, here’s a short clip from my drawing practice session this morning. I didn’t film this for a demonstration, though, I just started the camera running and whatever came out, came out. But this is me, pretty much every morning. In my new studio at home. I do it standing up 🙂
How is your “Na”?
If you like the idea of this kind of practice but worry that you won’t be able to find the time or have the commitment to keep it going, I think I may be able to help you.
I’m currently putting together a free short course with a few really powerful but simple drawing exercises, and a simple system of daily email reminders to keep you on track. It should be ready just in time for the New Year.
It’s free. If you’d like to get it in your in box in the new year to get your 2018 off to a good start, just fill in the form below and I’ll send it to you when it’s ready.
What might change if you started the new year by working on your “Na”?
I love this explanation of what you do and why – it puts it in perfect perspective to motivate myself similarly. Thank you for all that you do and share with us all.
You’re very welcome Barbara 🙂
Can you see much difference between the first ones you did and the last ones? Or is that not really the point? Is it more just about turning up?
Yes, they have improved markedly over time – which is the point, after all. That’s why the feedback is so important. If you’re not seeing any improvement, there’s little point in the exercise.
But turning up is a very important part of it too, because without that, nothing happens at all!
Excellent post, as usual. This reminds me of something I’ve been meaning to bring up with you – the use of color-checkers and Munsell chips while painting.
I think that exercises similar to your drawing exercises need to be developed for color. The use of color-checkers and chips while actually painting is very much like using a proportional divider, grid, or projector – a useful aide while learning, or to save time. But developing accurate ‘aide-free’ drawing ability is an essential skill for an artist – for speed, facility, and the ability to alter/enhance what is seen because the ‘mechanics’ have been ingrained and no longer require aides. This is what aides should be for – to assist in developing ability, rather than an ongoing support.
No one seems to have developed exercises that teach us to hard-wire accurate color perception.
I envision something like a computer-game with an image that has a specific section pointed to, and then a visual ‘list’ of colors to choose from, with the ‘true’ color being one of them.
Such an exercise could be set for a beginner with a very simple image (a grid of coloured squares), and the selection ‘list’ being easily distinguished. Both the image and the ‘selection list’ could be made progressively more difficult (colours progressively more difficult to distinguish from each other), moving on to actual photographic images with many subtle gradations to choose from.
In this way, artists could train themselves to see colour and accurately identify it (and therefore mix it), despite the many tricks our brains try to play on us. Much as we do in drawing – where we learn to bypass the symbolic parts of our brains and draw what we see (an eye, in all it’s asymmetrical complexity), rather that what our brain tells us we see (a circle inside an oval).
Brilliant Kent! I’ve actually gone some way to this with my colour courses – there are exercises included designed to train the eye to judge colour more accurately, and learn to mix it more accurately too. I’m sure a more systematic approach could be developed, though, things can always be improved.
Thanks for putting that on my to-do-list 🙂
The wonderful artist Robert Liberace once told me that a good way for an artist to train his/her eye is to make a shape on tracing paper, then try to duplicate it exactly on another piece of paper, then to check yourself – a valuable exercise on a long airplane flight (after you get tired of drawing the people in the aisle seats. :)) .
Artist Darren Rousar has a download titled “An Accurate Eye” which is another great resource for exercises such as the Ani Art Academy one you are writing about. They progress from easy-ish to quite difficult and are well worth doing.
So nice to see you back at work, thanks for all you share Paul!
Oh I’ve done that exercise! Yes, it’s a really good one, and very similar to this one.
If anyone is interested, here’s the link to Darren’s eBook:
An Accurate Eye
I really must put together a post of all the best free resources I know of! Darren’s stuff will certainly be there, he’s excellent 🙂
No longer free. $16 to download.
Very cool, thank you again for taking the time and sharing. I look forward to your tutelage. I hope you have a wonderful Christmas. 🙂
Thanks Carlos, you too 🙂
As a former professional musician who has been playing guitar since 1984, one thing that keeps coming back to me as I follow my art journey (since 2016), is that in painfully learning guitar over the decades, I learned to LEARN. I saw the effect of all the shortcuts I took when I was younger, I saw the impact of studied practice as I got older. And I got intimately familiar with the reality that one needs to practice regularly to keep one’s chops up. Even a few days off has a noticeable impact.
Luckily, my primary art instructor was raised in a family of classical musicians and composers, so we can discuss art using musical concepts! Learning the notes, the scales, the chords, all of the fundamentals of art: the line, the shape, the form, etc.
So I passionately shade a simple sphere, knowing that it is making me a better portrait artist. If only I had known that practicing those ‘chords I don’t need right now’ would have made me a richer and more well-rounded guitarist!
I couldn’t agree more! I think it would be a great benefit to a lot of visual artists to spend some time learning to play an instrument – if for no other reason to discover what discipline is!
If you add up all the daily exercises, does there not come a point when the exercises have taken over and making a painting or drawing in a subject or style that you like, just fades a away. Maybe each painting you do cannot be perfect but you could give yourself feedback from the painting to improve the next one. Otherwise your whole art experience becomes just exercises; buying and using equipment purely to get things exact, perfect. Is perfection the only theme in a painting, what about personal interests or beliefs? Does all this come from doing realistic painting? I can’t imagine Picasso practising values to any extent Maybe you could frame the exercises and exhibit them.
If all you did was exercises, sure. But that’s not my position. I would say that at the beginning, you should do all, or at least mostly exercises. But this is just a part of what I do with my day – I do paintings too. And in those, all of the other things you talk about come through – I hope! The point of practice, to me, is to make sure that when I do try to create something meaningful, I’m not held back by a lack of skill.
And yes, I paint realistically and write for artists who want to paint realistically. If you want to paint modernism, more a turn of the century style, the requirements are rather different, in my view. A large part of modernism has been the refutation of skill, to the extent that post modern artists talk about de-skilling, as if it were desirable. That’s not a position I have much interest in – or time for, frankly.
Picasso is a bad example. If you look at his early work, he was a wonderful figurative realist. It was only later that he chose to delve into ‘modern’ techniques. Having a solid grounding in the fundamentals allows you the artistic choice to express yourself however you’d like. Lacking those fundamentals, you are a slave to your poor technique and will always struggle to express yourself eloquently.
As I near my second year as a mostly self-taught art student, I spend the bulk of my sketchbook and easel time working on studies to improve my vocabulary. I do take a break for fun stuff now and again, but get so frustrated by my lack of tools to translate my inner visions onto paper/canvas, that I’m always invigorated to get back to study.
It does help that I love to study things, though. And it definitely pays dividends, I can see marked improvement at just about every level as I continually look at my work with an honest eye and target my own weak points (a necessity for an autodidact!).
“Lacking those fundamentals, you are a slave to your poor technique and will always struggle to express yourself eloquently.” Very eloquently put, Cash!
I couldn’t agree more. Judy
You are awesome Paul.
Thank you so much!!!
❤️❤️❤️
Thanks Anita 🙂
Thank you, Paul! I’m not getting to paint right now, but I still think you are the best Artist, and Art Teacher, I have ever known! I hope to get back to painting soon, with Your help! I hope you are happy at your new home! Best Wishes for the Holidays! Always Your Friend… Helen
Thanks Helen, always great to hear from you. We’re very happy thanks, all the best to you too 🙂
My long departed Auntie used to like to say, “There are many ways to live a life”….
Hawthorne almost scoffed at drawing-said drawing and painting were the same. Your morning exercises, to my way of being in the world, look like torture. Like math or sewing. Wonderfully engaging for those blessed with patience and the joy of precision. I can honor and appreciate the exercise. But would rather do my taxes.
That said, I love to step out of my “zone” and try new approaches-so grateful to you for your posts and sharing.
Hah! Taxes, that’s funny 🙂 I agree with your aunt, there are indeed many ways to live a life. The approach I take isn’t right for everyone, to be sure. I find the practice meditative and enjoyable. I can see it being a kind of slow torture for some though!
Thanks Paul for your posts, always educative and inspiring. Although I’ve been painting for years, I see how much I lack the basics for getting decent figurative paintings. So I dedicated this past year to just doing exercises . Last week I worked on two paintings that I had left aside a year ago as I felt I was stuck and worked on them again. Suddenly I could see what was wrong and I had the skills to improve them. All the learning I did this last year have paid off. And of course I will continue learning while doing more finished paintings.
Merry Christmas Paul and happy new year in your new home. Judy
Today I was I in one of the Chinese calligraphy and art supply shops that I frequent here in Kuala Lumpur. The owner of the shop was looking critically at my attempt to copy a couple of Chinese characters on my CNY dog painting. One stroke in particular was quite off. He demonstrated how to do it and I spent about the next 45 minutes working on that one stroke. A calligraphy artist walked in and gave me some more correction. I made considerable improvement during that time and decided I would go home and continue to work on it. Before I left the shop I asked the name of the stroke, and he replied, “Na”. On the subway home, I kept thinking, I’m sure Paul blogged about practicing his NA recently. A quick google search brought me back here. It wasn’t what I thought it would be, but there are many parallels. NA is one of the 8 basic strokes in the Chinese character used to teach calligraphy which means forever or eternity (Yong). The stroke must be firm and confident, executed just so. So I too shall continue to practice my Na.
Wow. That’s beautiful.