Today I am thinking about a quote from Philip Pullman that I read in a recent interview with the author in The New Yorker Magazine: “Reason is a good servant but a bad master.”

Without tools of construction—and reason—it is hard to build an image like Dawn Chorus Unbound. But with too much reasoning in advance, one loses the Beginner’s Mind advantage: a sense of play, and being open to creative serendipity. 

In art, as in life, I try to keep a balance between analytic rigor and flexible thinking. One needs both modes, truly one does.