The importance of repeating the same thing

I watch my daughter draw. She uses colored markers, her favorite medium. She draws a horse, stops and shows it to me, explaining something about it. Then she picks up a second sheet of paper and draws another…and another…and another…. This can go on for several hours. She generally goes through from twenty to fifty sheets of paper per day, every day. This has been going on since she was three; she is now seven. I have one closet in our house that is filled with her drawings, stacks and stacks and stacks of papers, stored away in boxes.

Today she is drawing horses. This may go on for days. To one who does not understand the process of art, her actions may appear redundant. They might wonder: Why is she drawing the same subject over and over? But, at the end of the week, when I take her drawings out of the bin to store them away and I look at them all, side by side, one after the other, I can see the progression. She is working through a problem in her mind: she is attempting to capture motion. The first horses are stiff, standing still, legs straight. Then they begin to prance across the page; some are rearing up, others kicking their heels in the air. Finally, they are galloping, running headlong, their manes and tails fluttering in the wind.

Last week it was faces – human faces – dozens of them, each one unique. Differently shaped eyes, mouths, noses. Different hair colors and skin tones. Some faces round or oval, others squarish or long. Like with the horses, some drawing depicted a single figure, others, a multitude – a herd of horses or a whole crowd of faces.

I try not to get too involved in what she is doing. I do not want to pressure her in any way. This is something that she has picked up on her own, something that just seems to come naturally to her, and I do not want to burden her with any expectations of my own. But I observe, I always watch what she is doing, with enormous fascination and even a little awe, because I know that what she is doing – just this sort of ongoing obsession, this sort of repetition – is what makes an artist an artist. Through repetition, she is teaching herself to draw, she is learning the same sorts of lessons that might otherwise be taught in an art class. The difference is that she is learning them, not just for the moment, but she is learning them well, wholly absorbing each new concept as she works her way through it.

Several years ago, for example, I can remember when she first began to understand perspective. I never tried to explain it to her, but she just picked it up, through observation and repetition. One day she came to me and said, “Mom, look! The things that are higher up on the paper and smaller – those things are far away. The things at the bottom and that are larger – those are close up.” So I began to show her paintings which illustrated the succession of the development of perspective throughout history. Similarly, I remember when she discovered the concept of dynamism, all on her own. She began to draw animals with many legs and with lines radiating out from them. She said, “Look! They are running.” She drew a man, the same man, in succession, over and over, across the paper, a little higher up each time. She explained, “He’s jumping into the air!” So I showed her Balla’s “Dog on a Leash” as well as the works of other futurist artists.

The thing is that she is teaching herself, perhaps better than I or any arts instructor could ever teach her. She is learning through repetition. When I show her examples of other artists’ works in response to what she is doing, this only serves to reinforce the lesson she has already learned on her own.

When I watch her doing this, going through page after page of paper, drawing for hours each and every day, I am reminded of artists such as Rodin, who sculpted many of the same figures over and over for many years, until he achieved precisely the pose and effect that he was seeking. The willingness to undertake this sort of repetition is not something that comes easily. It cannot be forced by external pressures. One has to be drawn to it, naturally, compelled from within. Me, for example, I could draw one subject once, and that would be it. I could not possibly make myself draw several hundred dogs, over and over, until I got it right. I would expire of boredom. I would lose interest completely. And yet I can write essentially the same story over and over – one time as an autobiographical essay, again as a short story, another time as a short story from another perspective, again as a chapter in a novel, and finally in a flash fiction piece. This does not bore me. I feel compelled to repeat, because I am trying to get it right. I know the story wants to be told – I just have to find the right form.

So, when it comes to practice and repetition, our attempts to be like that blacksmith in Paulo’s story, I think that our willingness to repeat is an actual indicator of what undertakings we are naturally inclined toward – in other words, what is our personal destiny. I might think, for example, that I want to take up mounted archery because I have always been fascinated by it, but when I actually get a bow in my hand and mount a horse, I might find that I am incapable of enduring the kind of persistent practice that sets apart an excellent archer from the mere mediocre. This does not mean that I should not pursue archery as a hobby if it is my wish to do so, but it is highly unlikely that I shall ever become another Lajos Kassai. It is not my destiny. One’s willingness to repeat an undertaking, again and again, in success and in failure, the driving compulsion to repeat it until one perfects ones skills – this is likely a very good indicator of where one’s true destiny lies.

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