Wednesday, March 07, 2012

Time Not Wasted

The years spent trying to make a career in commercial art were not altogether wasted. I learned how to draw, which seems to be something of an accomplishment nowadays. That meant learning anatomy for one thing, since a lot of what I did involved the human figure. I very rarely attack the figure nowadays, and instead concentrate on still lifes and landscapes. But I’m certain that knowing where the coracobrachialis is does improve my work in some indefinable way.

At least at the outset I will write more about the difficulties and challenges posed by landscapes. They have proven more difficult for me than the still lifes, so I have had to think a lot more about how to do them. One of my professors often remarked that we learn more from our mistakes than from our successes. If so, I have learned an awful lot about painting and drawing landscapes.

At the present however, I know more about what not to do, than what I ought to do.

Sunday, March 04, 2012


Getting Over Perfectionism.
I don’t think of abstraction as a theoretical concept. Rather, it seems to be the cure to an artistic disease. I know I have to edit what I see before I put it down on a piece of paper.

Perfectionism has a common traveling companion: the conviction that a good piece of work must by definition be hard to do. An old boss of mine from one of my various dead end jobs had a saying: the easy way is the right way.

I think he meant, more or less, that there is an efficient and natural way to do a thing, and a lot of inefficient and counterproductive ways to do the same thing. If we keep running into roadblocks, and find that something is starting to seem impossibly difficult, then maybe we should think about a different way of doing it. Drawing every tiniest detail eventually gets to be infinitely frustrating, and the result usually looks like an impenetrable mess.

I’ve struggled with this concept for a long time. My professors used to look over my shoulder at whatever masterpiece I happened to be slaving over, and ask me “Where am I supposed to look?” All I could do is say: “Everywhere!”