This One Trick Will Make You a Successful Artist
The trick - the secret - to being a successful artist is that - and I'm going to tell you right in the beginning and not make you wade through pages of text and links - and that's good because no one has time for that because the secret of artists everywhere of all kinds and shapes and sizes is that, first and foremost, you have to MAKE art.
And keep making art.
The Tyranny of the Real
When, as an artist, you choose to include 'the real' in your work - and I mean actual real objects or even just corners and elements thereof - you know, things like faces or noses or hands or leaves or cornices - you've stepped into the territory of 'having something to say' because now we are creating relationships. No object exists within a vacuum. All things have some meaning.
And don't try to throw out meaning. The Surrealists already did that. They threw out meaning in an effort to foster the random associative quality of the subconscious mind. Cool. Cool. We'd never done that before - as a culture. But now we have broader understandings of scopes of our creative selves. We're playing with more than just the subconscious. We're exploring the subconscious, the id, and the superego all together.
It Is a Good Time To Make Art
"I recalled the artists who had done their work in gulags, prison cells, hospital beds; who did their work while hounded, exiled, reviled, pilloried. And those who were executed...
This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.
“Study for ‘The Battle of Tetuan'” – Dali
Study for 'The Battle of Tetuan'
Salvador Dali
1962
This little painting - it's about 7" x 9" - resides in the Dali Museum in Figueras, Spain, in an over-packed room filled with art and oddities, almost disappearing into the surrealist melange. You would be excused were you to overlook it.
Seeing the Spontaneous Creation Through to Completion
There's much to be said for the value of doodling. I've probably even said a bit of it already. I think so much importance is put on the idea of 'a finished drawing' that it's sometimes possible to loose sight of the looseness of the spontaneous flow. In fact, the specificity of a 'finished drawing' (said with such grand eloquence) can cause one to over think what one is setting out to do.
When I make a drawing of a painting I'm going to create there's a lot of, well, doodling that goes into those first intimations of the image. When an idea comes to me it's never a fleshed out finished thing. It's sort of like a big broad brushstroke that says 'something like this.' What follows are a lot of scribbles, dashes and dots, lines and curves, and trying to understand my lines, my motives, my reasons for making it.
Setting Up the Studio (Some Suggestions)
It's true: one CAN paint anywhere. And paint anywhere I have: on a board propped up by a chair surrounded by jungle. On a canvas taped to a wall in a downtown studio. Small shared spaces where what I called 'mine' was merely the space of the stool, the canvas, and the paint… One CAN paint anywhere in the same way that grass pokes through a crack in the pavement, or there's a bird's nest on a telephone pole, a flower in a metal pipe poking out from the ground in the ground.
But, given the choice - and when presented with options - I've found certain factors provide a more ideal situation. Here's a list of some… Your mileage may vary…
Living From an Aesthetically Pleasing Perspective
The thing is, at 3am you're up and you're getting something to eat and maybe a drop to drink and you notice: the plane of the wall meets the plane of the ceiling and the busy-ness of the spice rack to the planar composition of the stove top sort of off sets the shifting perspectives and it's so sublimely perfect that you really just want to go wake everyone up but you know that you and you alone might be the only one to ever have appreciated this corner of reality. Blue to burgundy to beige to gold and you can't help but want to run to the type writer - the keyboard - the pen and the pencil - and get it down - that inspiration. Maybe you just study the lines and do your best to remember it.
To the casual observer that sounded like a lot of hokey artspeak. But you and I: we are not casual observers.