This week, I got messy.  I scribbled with my left hand, cut out shapes free hand from old sketches and glued them on to the drawing, allowing the glue to leak off to the side, and allowed (with a great amount of restraint on my part) the edge of my paper not to be straight. 

It was tough, but I like it.  It's a different kind of impulsivity. 

In a lot of ways, the way we draw is similar to proofs in many areas of math.  In geometric topology, for instance, a proof depends entirely on the formal definitions you assign to your initial assumption.  that assumption may or may not be true in other "real" worlds, but if you can make a disciplinary argument for it (i.e., describe it in the logic of the discipline), then the proof that follows, if rigorous, must be true.  This, of course, is the trouble with all Euclidean Geometry, since Euclid was never able to describe his Fifth Postulate infallibly in the vocabulary of the math with which he tried to argue for it.  That's why we're lucky enough to have spherical, elliptical and hyperbolic geometry as well as all fields of topology today.

But I digress.  The point I'm making is that art, in this way, is math.  The vocabulary of the artist is different from that of the mathematician since we don't rely on logic, but our decision tree is similar to that of the mathematician.  Start with a truth that you, in your own disciplinary terms, have decided to be a truth, and move on with that same vocabulary.  That's what separates math and art from science.

So, in a lot of ways, my "messy" drawing is not unlike my clean drawings of previous weeks.   The impulse to lead with my left hand is the initial truth that I assigned to the proof, or the produced work, and all that followed was the logical growth of that initial impulse.

I don't think I will ever, ever be able to diverge from this way of thinking, mostly because I'm perfectly convinced by the logic of both discrete and continuous math.