Art & Perception

On the first day of class my freshman drawing teacher had us all go out and buy 9″ x 11″ hardbound sketchbooks. We were expected to carry them around with us over the course of the semester, and draw constantly. Now, thirty years later, I find that I have an encyclopedia set of these books filling a shelf in my studio. Keeping journals/sketchbooks has become an integral part of my art practice and my everyday life.  But the way I use them has changed.

               I think of a sketchbook as something you draw in, and a journal as something you write in. And though I’ve always used the same book for both, I see that mine have evolved over the years, from more sketchbook to more journal. In the early ones I did very involved drawings, sitting for hours doing studies from nature, or drawing people. These days the drawings in my journals tend to be notational, and if I do anything more finished it’s on single sheets of paper. 

              My journals function as sketchbooks, idea books, diaries and scrapbooks. I always have the current one with me, in the bookbag that I carry around, along with whatever I’m reading at the time. And over the years I’ve developed certain conventions for them. For example, I’ve gotten in the habit of starting each entry with the date, time and location, so it’s very easy for me now to look back through them and see when certain ideas initially occurred, or where I was when I was writing about something. I also, early on, started keeping a list on the back page of the journal of the books I read. I list the title, author, and the date I finished reading it, and if the book made a particularly strong impression on me I put a star next to it. So at this point I have a running list of pretty much every book I’ve read during my adult life, including re-reads, and a simple rating system that is useful when I want to go back and retrieve information, or recommend books to friends. When the journal is full I put a number on the spine and add it to the shelf, and I start a new one.

               These journals serve several functions for me. The most obvious is that they’re a place to store ideas so I don’t forget them. Putting them down on paper also forces me to clarify the ideas somewhat, at least enough to put them into words or a sketch, and it also relieves me of the burden of carrying them around in my head. Often seeing the idea on paper helps to spur variations. Sometimes these ideas are visual, sometimes verbal. Sometimes I’ll start with a quick drawing, spin out a verbal list of associations or connections, and then do more drawings. So the journal becomes a place to not only record ideas but also to develop them.

               The journals are not just for my art practice, but are part of my everyday life. I use them as diaries; to record my thoughts, concerns and activities. They are scrapbooks that contain newspaper clippings, postcards and concert tickets. I’ve been writing songs almost as long as I’ve been painting, and the journals contain endless lists of possible titles. It’s pretty obvious how a title can be a starting point for writing a song, but I’ve also had titles launch whole series of paintings. The old cliche about a picture being worth a thousand words also works in reverse –a word can evoke a thousand pictures. Sometimes the same title will result in both a song and a painting. I keep all of these possibilities pretty open-ended, and don’t try to figure them out right away.

               Keeping the journals has taught me a lot about my creative process. I see ideas appear, and then reappear months or even years later, but changed in some way. Like they’ve been percolating under the surface, accumulating resonance and layers of meaning without my awareness. I can read diary entries from years ago, see the things I was excited or worried about, and gain perspective on how they’ve played out in my life. And most of all, the journals are a library of ideas, some terrible and some pretty good, more ideas than I could ever execute in several lifetimes.  I’ve learned not to edit or judge the ideas when I get them, everything goes in, and later when I look back through I pick the ones that are most promising to pursue.

               When people visit my studio and see the journals lined up on my shelf, they say “Oh, you must be very disciplined. I’ve tried to keep journals before, but I always stop.” But the truth is that I’m not disciplined about it at all. Here’s the big secret, the way I’ve been able to keep these journals going all these years – I don’t write or draw in them every day. When you try to do something as a discipline, like a diet or a New Years resolution, it’s easy to start out very gung ho, then miss a day or two, and decide that you’ve failed and you might as well give up. In my case, sometimes I’m working in the journal several times a day, and other times weeks will go by without an entry. But I’ve always got it with me, so it’s there when I need it.

I’m sure many of you keep sketchbooks or journals of some kind. In what ways is your process similar to mine? How is yours different?

Recently another student doing a school project at the University of Southern Indiana was comparing one of my works to a Salvador Dali painting asked me to give him some insight on the meaning of “The Eclipse”.

“The Eclipse of Love” (complete title) is one of my early works. It is one of my most romantic sensual pieces… My work is personal and about my life experiences at the time. The idea of this painting came from a sketch I made in the summer inspired by the total Eclipse of the sun (Aug 1999).

At the time, husband and I were starting our romance and would spend hours of tongue rolling and strolling in the park under the trees. In 2001 when we moved together I decided to make a painting of this idea as a reminder of how our relationship started. It’s hanged in our bedroom since.

I would probably sell many of my paintings but this one is the one I am mostly emotional attached to. This student after examining my painting “The Eclipse of Love” to Dali’s “Cannibalism in autumn” found out that they are very similar in his opinion. But the main difference he found was that I was expressing love while he is expressing death… Any thoughts??

This is an excerpt from something that looks like it will grow into a book, but right here, right now, I thought I would go directly to the heart of the subject.

I do not expect to win any popularity contests with this post. Truthfully, I am so far south of caring about that, I think new words would have to invented to describe my insouciance. As “posts” go, it is long, but I barely scratch the surface of the topic.

I can think of a great number of reasonable objections to what I say here. I doubt I’ve heard them all.

But let me say this. I know that for many people, doing art is not about money. Money is no true measure of success. Success is a multi-faceted jewel. Pride. Self fullfillment. Joy of creation. These are worthy. I honor anyone’s right to pursue their craft on their own terms. There are certain forms that are simply not economically viable. Artists who work in those form know that. They continue out of love, and truthfully, I love them for it.

But this post is about making money at art. It’s about making enough money at art to do only art.

Surviving as full time artist is a worthy ambition. I make no defense of that goal. It needs no justification. No explanation is required. None will be offered. It has always been my ambition to live through my art since the first synapses of my mind ever fired. I am by nature a type who must be self employed. Factually, by actual experience, I would rather die than fill out another job application.

I’ve made tons of money in other ways than art, however. I’ve made it doing things that made me sick to my soul, like pretending people needed college in order to be educated, only to see them betrayed by a market which had no place for their skills; rather, their lack therof. I am not a person who is impressed by degrees, rank, position, reputation, or money. I like money. I like the things money can buy. I like fast cars and motorcycles. I like vacations to the islands and long trips in yachts. I like to race horses on mountain paths. I like dining with crystal and dancing till dawn wearing seven thousand dollars worth of clothes, but money is not the measure of a man or a woman. I’d just as soon wear a t-shirt and blue jeans and dig in the dirt as sit in another gods forsaken boardroom and watch another boring brain fart of a Powerpoint presentation.

In this post, though I could not resist “insouciance” above, I have purposely kept the language simple. In fact, as I wrote, I kept in mind the vocabulary and attitude of a bright and rebellious teenager. This is stuff I wish I studied when I was sixteen instead of all the artsy fartsy theory I was discovering then.

How to Make a Living as an Artist

It’s not enough to be good. There are plenty of good artists. more… »

Hanneke van Oosterhout recently showed this painting in earlier states. She got valuable suggestions from Rex, David, Colin, Jon, and Jewel as to how to improve the picture. Rather than respond in words, she has responded by modifying the painting itself. The latest version is shown above [click image to enlarge].

Is the painting finished?

Nearly seven years into the 21st century and there is no one recognized “art movement” for this new age. The 20th century saw many attempts at changing the status quo, and shaking the art world loose: perhaps beyond repair. Despite all the art movements of the 20th century, a few held on and many gone. There are two art genres however, that have been steadily gaining more attention across the world. While not exactly new genres, there is a freshness being breathed into “plein air” and “conceptual” style art, popularized by artists like Howard Pyle.

Plein air was popular in the late 19th, and early 20th centuries, in recent years it has become renewed for both the skill required to participate, and the public festival atmoshpere it creates in the communities where they are hosted. Another popular standout today is “conceptual” art, this style is being fueled by a new generation of computer savvy game designers and their need for graphics and background scenes. Inspired by great illustrators, and 30 years of “future” based T.V. and movies, this “new” art form is responsible for scenes one might see in movies like “Star Wars” or “Dune”. The unique thing about this art is the inventiveness and imaginative capacity required to create it, artists are literally creating their own worlds based entirely on conceptual imagination. I believe that both these artforms will continue growing in popularity, “plein air” for it’s ties to classicism and the adroit skills needed to capture an essence, the other for it’s ability to delve into the creative depths of imagination. In similar fashion to Jules Verne or H.G. Wells, these “conceptual” artists may inspire through their works, new ideas in the minds of engineers that could indeed become reality.

Does anyone have any ideas about the direction art is heading in the 21st century? Are there art movements that are sweeping your area? What type of art will children born today be influenced by as they grow older?

Stephen Dietz is a playwright I admire greatly, not only for his wonderful, beautifully crafted and deeply insightful plays, but also for his incredible attention to process and craft.  Once, after watching Stephen listening intently to an actor reciting lines that Stephen has just revised during a workshop of one of his plays, I asked him why it was so important to him to hear the words read aloud.  He told me he had learned, long ago, that when he was confronted with a choice in his writing between meaning and sound, to go with sound every time.

A few years ago, I had the extraordinary good fortune to hear one of Stephen’s lectures, in which Stephen proposed what he called “The Four Seductions” – pitfalls that ensnare us and seduce us away from the real business of creating art and instead lead us down blind alleys and stymie our growth as artists. 

Stephen’s list of the Four Seductions is:

• Distrust of Beauty 
• Disparagement of Craft 
• Criticism 
• Blaming the Audience 

Distrust of Beauty – In the current art world, it’s fashionable to advance our work by making it ‘edgy’.  There’s a sort of consensus that ‘beauty’ has been done to death, and that if a work is beautiful, then it  must be passé.   There’s a sense that since beauty is a quality that’s awfully hard to pin down, that it  must therefore be unimportant, and that striving for beauty is a fool’s errand.  It’s a whole heck of a lot easier to provoke an emotional response by doing art that’s gratuitously offensive than it is to make art that arouses a passionate response by making something beautiful.  Because of these pressures, it’s often the case that we’re not attentive enough the place of beauty in our art.  And, before we get caught up in the “I don’t want to just make pretty things”, I’d like to quote Eolake Stobblehouse, who wrote that “Note that beautiful does not necessarily mean pretty. Pretty is Beautiful’s popular sister.”

Disparagement of Craft – Likewise, there’s a sense that craft is not what art is about, and therefore it’s unimportant.  Thus we get plays that are poorly structured, with poorly written dialogue and hopeless plotting, offered up with the excuse that because the subject matter of the play is socially relevant and ‘edgy’ (note the implicit disparagement of beauty) we should excuse the poor craft.  Stephen told an anecdote about going to Europe with his family and some friends, and seeing all the glorious sculptures done by Michangelo, Donatello, et al.  He asked his friend (a sculptor, apparently) why no one did representational sculpture any more.  His friend replied “Because, Stephen, it’s Very Hard to Do.”  Craft is sometimes hard, and the temptation to slip one past can be overwhelming. 

Criticism – It’s far easier to criticize than to create.  There are lots of artists in the world who look at work and say “Hey, I could do that, and do it better”.  But somehow, they never seem to get around to doing the work – they’ve been distracted by the flush they get when they elevate themselves above the productive artist by picking apart work that’s actually been done.  Stephen suggested that when you catch yourself engaging in some criticism, that you should look at what you’re thinking/saying.  Are you trying to figure out what went wrong, and what might be done to put it right?  Or are you looking at the work and trying to find ways to run it down so that you feel superior to the artist? 

Blaming the Audience – Finally, when one of our works of art fails, the temptation is to blame the audience.  They aren’t perceptive enough, they aren’t smart enough, they don’t have the right education, or perhaps they simply aren’t sensitive enough to respond correctly to your work (which you feel is absolutely superlative in every respect).  If only we had the RIGHT audience, we assure ourselves, our work would get the recognition and acclaim it (and we) deserves. 

I’m sure I’ve done an inadequate job of trying to capture Stephen’s ideas accurately – for one thing, he advanced all of this in a far more articulate way than I ever could.  But I heard the lecture a couple of years ago, now, and I find that I’m still turning all these ideas over in my head. If you can look past my meager presentation and try to get to Stephen’s ideas, I think there’s a lot there for consideration. 

Lisa Call is the head site admin on Art & Perception (A&P). She does a great job. She has a full time job as an artist and mother, and another full time job in the computer industry. When she is not doing these labors, she writes great blog posts.

Every extra detail on the site means extra work for Lisa. Every sidebar feature is a point of contention, a potential source of conflict.

I say, strip this site down to the bare minimum for functionality.

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