Diagonal Frog

In the book «Diagonal Frog», artist, teacher, writer, and musician Viktor Melamed shares his experience of using metaphor in teaching, creative, and viewing work, his views on art, and exercises for creative thinking.

What common ground is there among such different areas of human activity as literature, music, and visual arts? Perhaps the desire to take some fact of being or consciousness, accessible sensually or intellectually, to communicate about it, somewhat distorting it, but through this distortion adding something—if, of course, the work succeeds.

Simply put, the most diverse types of art can coexist in parallel, but they will always be connected by one instrument—metaphor. At least, this is what the artist, musician, and, more recently, practicing prose writer Viktor Melamed believes.

The image of the diagonal frog was borrowed by the author from the pioneer and veteran of digital art Kai Krause, who noted: «A good analogy is like a diagonal frog.» Based on this image, Melamed constructs a kind of treatise (or anti-treatise, depending on the perspective) on, as one might easily guess, metaphor in art.

But he does this in such a way that the book about the diagonal frog itself becomes a diagonal frog, describing the zigzags of the creative mind with its jumps, leaping from focused research on the metaphor of training to abstract reflections on artificial intelligence, from comparisons of the creative attitudes of Cézanne, Brodsky, and German Lukomnikov (in favor of the first) to Zen Buddhist theories and practices.

«Talent is a word-axe. By placing it in the cauldron where the creative individuality and unique language of the artist are brewed, we add educational experience, viewer experience, life experience, peculiarities of body and thinking, social environment, a tendency to play, neuroses, the experience of imposing high standards of quality on one's creative work, attention to nuances, consistency, stubbornness—and we throw talent to hell.»

The book contains numerous exercises for independent completion aimed at overall aesthetic development.