PATCH | rough sketch

Last week I wrote about the struggle to begin a project.  Today comes the really fun part- STARTING OVER.

I painted the art for a new children’s book project last week.  (It’s a fast style for this one, so I got all 15 spreads done in five days).    Monday morning I came in and could see that the art was just not good enough.  Color, line, harmony… uggh.

Here’s a secret the pros never mentioned during their dazzling slide shows when I was in art school:  Professional artists are not magicians who nail it on the first try every time.

If you are not satisfied with your work, it is not evidence of a lack of talent.  It means you have the eye to know when it’s right and when it’s not.   Not everybody has that.

Now the question I have to face today is –Do I love the process or only the final result?

Time to fall in love with the process again…

“Talent is the willingness to keep trying until it’s right.” 

-John F. Carlson (Carlson’s Guide to Landscape Painting)

 

 

 

“Once you have decided what it is about your subject you wish to paint, ignore the rest of what you see.”

- Richard Schmid (from David Slonim’s notes taken at a workshop with Richard, Loveland, CO, Nov. 1997)

“I do about two temperas a year and only about twenty watercolors are good enough to let out.” 

-(Andrew Wyeth:  An Interview, The Art of Andrew Wyeth, Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco,1973.)

Andrew Wyeth, "Woodchopper Study", watercolor, 1964

Thank God for Wyeth’s honesty.   He was a master not only because he painted great art, but because he was wise enough to not show the other stuff.  He edited his body of work.

I’m learning that the best way to produce a body of top-quality work is to produce a lot of work and then select the best of the bunch. Nobody needs to see the rest.  A mature artist knows that most of what he or she paints is prep work for the good stuff.

So if only 10-20% of what I produce is good enough to release to the market, that’s not a problem.    It’s part of the creative process.

Thanks for the encouragement, Mr. Wyeth.

“No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.  No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.”

- Robert Frost

I love the moment a piece of art or a story starts breathing.   This is the payoff in the creative process for all the trying and failing, all the anxiety, the doubt, the fear, the mountain of sketches and endless revisions.   The individual parts suddenly begin talking to each other.   One area of color to another, one story event to another…What had been a cobbled-together patchwork  becomes a unified harmony.    There was a general plan, but this was not foreseen.   Weeks and months of digging — finally the gold.   The art is now telling you where it’s going, what it wants to be.    Now we’re flying. 

Magic.

Treasure is always buried.

KEEP DIGGING...

“You can approach the act of writing with nervousness, excitement, hopefulness, or even despair– the sense that you can never completely put  on the page what’s in your mind and heart.  You can come to the act with your fists clenched and your eyes narrowed, ready to kick ass and take down names.  You can come to it because you want a girl to marry you or because you want to change the world.  Come to it any way but lightly.  Let me say it again:  you must not come lightly to the blank page.”

- Stephen King, On Writing, (New York, Simon and Schuster, 2000), 106

Corn Field (24 x 30) private collection

“My freedom thus consists in my moving about within the narrow frame that I have assigned myself for each one of my undertakings.  I shall go even further:  my freedom will be so much the greater and more meaningful, the more narrowly I limit my field of action and the more I surround myself with obstacles.”

- Igor Stravinsky (Poetics of Music, Harvard University Press, revised edition 1993)

There it is again, this time from a musician.  CREATIVITY THRIVES WITHIN CONSTRAINTS.

Having run across this principle expressed one way or another by painters, musicians, poets, screenwriters, actors…it becomes more and more clear--setting limits is the essential task in the beginning of a creative project.  If I want to grow as an artist, this is the place to focus most of my energies.

Making art is problem solving.

So, to make it practical -here are some questions for me to ask myself  before putting a brush to canvas:

• What is this canvas about?  (all other ideas must be edited out)
• What limitations will I impose on myself?
• What question am I asking and attempting to answer?
• What obstacles to an easy solution will I put in my way?