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Art and writing
Jan. 29th, 2012 10:38 amI love reading posts where writers talk about writing. I have always pottered around with fiction writing, whether it be stories or attempts at novels or plays or screenplays, and at several points in my life I've thought I might end up being a writer. Especially as I write about a thousand words a day in my (on paper and in longhand) journal. (I've also always thought I might end up as a musician - it's been a big part of my life - but that's another story). But as it turns out, I'm an artist. Not a very good one yet, but it takes years to develop and find your artistic voice, and I'm fine with that. The process is engaging and satisfying, but it's the one thing I find that no-one really talks about the way that writers talk about the writing process. Illustrators do. Graphic artists do. But I have never come across a blog where a fine artist talks about how they go about doing what they do. Not the coming up with ideas and expressing them part which I have no difficulty with - a lot of the time I have the ideas, just not the technique to express them yet - but the technical aspects of how they go about applying paint to canvas for instance. There are so many different approaches, and though art school has educated me in a general way about a variety of techniques, I still look at a lot of paintings and wonder how they did that, especially with contemporary art.
(And as an aside for people who have never had the confusing and conflicting and sometimes thouroughly demoralising experience of art school: they often don't teach you that much about technique. They're much more focused on getting you to "produce work" and be original and creative, which is incredibly difficult if you're coming from a place of never having done art much before. I've always had leanings towards art as with other creative endeavours but always kinda sucked at it, and then I randomly did a drawing class where something about it finally clicked and I immediately went, okay I'll apply to art school then. I failed to get in the first time but applied again a year later after having tried to teach myself painting in acrylic (and not succeeding terribly well) and surprisingly got in. The upshot was that I was way behind everyone else and floundered for the first couple of years.)
Perhaps the point is that artists aren't always that verbal. Making art certainly isn't - it uses a completely different part of your brain. Or maybe every artist comes across a working method at some point and then they stick to it and it doesn't occur to them to think about how they do what they do. There are so many minute decisions that go into doing something as simple as putting some paint onto a piece of canvas and often a lot of it is intuitive or even accidental. So, for my deconstruction of method I'm going to have to stick to reading writers talk about writing which, admittedly, I'm not going to get bored with any time soon. I just wish I could find something similar in the art world.
(And as an aside for people who have never had the confusing and conflicting and sometimes thouroughly demoralising experience of art school: they often don't teach you that much about technique. They're much more focused on getting you to "produce work" and be original and creative, which is incredibly difficult if you're coming from a place of never having done art much before. I've always had leanings towards art as with other creative endeavours but always kinda sucked at it, and then I randomly did a drawing class where something about it finally clicked and I immediately went, okay I'll apply to art school then. I failed to get in the first time but applied again a year later after having tried to teach myself painting in acrylic (and not succeeding terribly well) and surprisingly got in. The upshot was that I was way behind everyone else and floundered for the first couple of years.)
Perhaps the point is that artists aren't always that verbal. Making art certainly isn't - it uses a completely different part of your brain. Or maybe every artist comes across a working method at some point and then they stick to it and it doesn't occur to them to think about how they do what they do. There are so many minute decisions that go into doing something as simple as putting some paint onto a piece of canvas and often a lot of it is intuitive or even accidental. So, for my deconstruction of method I'm going to have to stick to reading writers talk about writing which, admittedly, I'm not going to get bored with any time soon. I just wish I could find something similar in the art world.
