As a kid I was big practitioner of comic book style drawing. Lately I’ve been taking it up again. I’m decades out of practice, but I’m reminded that much of drawing, particular drawing from life, requires a strong sense of space. Basically, you must take an image before you, say, two coffee cups a foot apart from each other, and preserve their relational distance while you draw the image on a piece of paper 6 inches wide.

For some reason today I was reminded of a high school friend of mine. When I knew him he was a top ranked tennis player in the state of Hawaii. We lost touch when I graduated but not long after that I heard he had become become a professional painter. When I knew him he had no interest in art. It seemed quite a switch—from tennis to art. But, as I think about it, tennis is also all about strong spatial awareness. You have to know where that ball is in space. I wonder of his (likely genetic) endowment for spatial awareness fueled both his tennis and art?