I’m a visual thinker. It has taken me quite a while to recognise this obvious fact about myself.

I am also a strong verbal thinker. That is confusing.

I quit drawing for more than ten years (between age 18 and 30 there was little drawing in my life). It was a great sadness, and I feel it stronger still. Starting at the university I thought I had to leave the artistic path of my childhood — all the others kids had stronger skills (I thought), I would never catch up. Better focus on safer talents.

So I killed the dream inside me. For 10 years. For 10 years I immersed myself in books and the world of ideas, it was good, I was good at it.

Then I got my first real job — at the university. And suddenly I knew it was wrong. I could not work as a university researcher, I saw myself dusting down in an faculty office. A kind of existencial dread piled up in me, I relised that the 15 old version of myself knew better what I want (and need) from life than the 30 year-old man sitting in the office. Thus began my journey back to my roots.

My connection with the written word did not end at the university, no, I spent 13 years working at the library. Slowly working my way back to the drawing table, doing digital cut up illustration in photoshop, learning graphic design (and soon filling a position as a graphic designer), pouring countless hours into learning digital design tools, doing figure drawing every week, 350+ portraits and editorial illustration. I moved on to leading the artistic direction of the library, doing interiors, deciding on colors, shelves and visual communication. It was good. I was good.

Side tracked. Underway I also found design thinking, and it both helped and hindered my journey. Helped by giving me new tools and compentences that complemented existing skills. It gave me a fresh start on expanding design to include innovation. And it gave me a language for the creativity that had always been there. It hindered me by being all consuming, it side-tracket my quest by turning me into a problem-solver. Even in entering into a proper design job at frog, I boxed myself into a mindset of fixing things, rather than just drawing and understanding things.

With this new clarity what would the 15 year old me ask me today — what would he say?

«Why are you not trusting art to provide?»

«I dare it not»

Center stage. Drawing has been an integral part of my being for ever, but I have never made it my main activity. It has been a support activity professionally, stardust to sprincle on the top. I have accepted the notion that good visuals is «nice to have». Never trusting my true core to provide. I will now. The dream is reborn.

Upon discovering that I am dyslexic it all starts to come together, and I see that there is a mission here. A true quest — there are others (visual thinkers, dyslexics and the like) that need the drawings and visualisations to understand the world. My drive to interpret the world in images is beneficial, and not just for me. I can both draw the understanding and show others the way. Drawing is indeed a «need to have».

So: Why do I draw? It is a hard question. I could say because I want to, I need to. For me the act of drawing — to think, to inspire, to make beautiful feels so right. It is compulsive, yet voluntary. It is autotelic, an end into and of itself. It is good.

The illustration is a study of a panel from the wonderful graphic story «KAYA» by Wes Craig with a quote from «Good Business» by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. A combination of visual and verbal