What is empathy?

—Design—

What is Empathy?

Empathy comes up often in discussions of design theory. I first started thinking about empathy when I stumbled upon an essay by Carl Rogers, the well-known psychologist, when I was an undergraduate. Empathy is not an exact science, though we have a lot of scientific evidence to illuminate empathy. Because there are different kinds of empathy, the word empathy can mean different things. This is empathy as I am understanding it, drawn from a number of resources I've read.

Empathy is the awareness of other people's thinking. Empathy is also the ability to sense other people’s emotions. Healthy empathy is objective. You don't think for another, but think in accord with them; you don't feel for another, but feel in accord with them. At the same time, you remain detached and retain your own thoughts and emotions, keeping them separate. You think or feel in accord with another person only as a tool to illuminate your own thinking and feeling, not to change yourself to match them. Empathy also means understanding and appreciating other people's experiences. It is the ability to imagine their point of view, or even their physicality, as they interact with situations or navigate systems. Empathy is the ability to imagine what someone else might be thinking or feeling or experiencing—to imaginatively experience their experiences, imaginatively feel their feelings, and imaginatively think their thoughts.

Empathy can also involve meaning. If you practice empathy, you can see others' world views, their cultural points of reference, their personal philosophies. Empathy is the ability to understand and identify with other people's contexts, goals, and motivations. It can involve predicting others' actions and reactions, their assumptions, and their predilections. When you have the ability to see the world as others see it, you become aware of different people's frames of reference. Furthermore, you can become more aware of the simple fact that people are different, and also the same.

Empathy is not sympathy. Sympathy means feeling sorry for someone's situation, but empathy doesn't necessarily imply sadness or distress or caring or concern. Sympathy is something you do in your own shoes, in your own reality, while considering another person's situation. Sympathy can mean reaching out to someone, and sympathy can include empathy. But empathy is specifically about paralleling your thoughts, feelings, and experiences with another person's thoughts, feelings, and experiences, as a way of understanding them. Empathy is something you do in an other person's shoes, in their reality, as far as is mentally possible. Empathy means imagining what they feel like in their situation. Sympathy is different. Sympathy is about having your own caring thoughts and feelings in regards to another person's experience. Sympathy means valuing another's feelings and experiences, from your own perspective.

Often, we are sympathetic where we cannot be empathic, because, in some situations, we can't understand another person's perspective; we sometimes can't imagine how they feel, or how we would feel. Sometimes the other person is, indeed, going through something we've gone through ourselves, but other times their situation is foreign to us and we cannot empathize. We can sympathize with them, nonetheless, because we appreciate their feelings, even if we can't know their feelings ourselves. We can feel for them, in our own ways of feeling. We can recognize the kinds of emotions they are feeling or recognize their needs.

Empathy happens when we are able, to a degree, to understand or visualize another's perspective. We are not adopting their thoughts or states of mind—not getting that far inside their heads—but simply recognizing where they are coming from. Empathy does not necessarily mean relating to another person's mind or emotions directly. Empathy means encountering their thoughts and feelings through the imagination. Some would say that empathy is most useful when it tends to be more cognitive, more logical. At any rate, where it is emotional, it works best when we don't let ourselves absorb too much of other people's emotions.

For the designer, empathy means objectivity. It means standing back and seeing what you are creating with fresh eyes, as if it is new to you. It is nonjudgmental. It means setting aside your own perceptions, especially as one so close to the product, in order to confront the interface and content and experience and interact with it the way others do, coming to the product as a customer, visitor, or other stakeholder instead of as the designer.

A very common neurological process, empathy occurs in all humans and many other animals. It may, in some ways, relate to the activity of mirror neurons. Empathy means distinguishing one's own mental and emotional states from those of other individuals, but in the process, also identifying with and conceptualizing what others are thinking, feeling, or meaning. Often we think of empathy as understanding another person's difficulties, but it also means understanding what works for them. Empathy comes in three forms: cognitive empathy, emotional empathy, and compassionate empathy.

Forms of empathy

Cognitive Empathy. This form of empathy is sometimes called perspective taking. This the mental process that allows us to see things from other points of view. It means conceptualizing other people's perspectives, but not necessarily vicariously and viscerally experiencing them. Cognitive empathy is separate from an emotional or compassionate empathy, though it can be paired with these other forms. Cognitive empathy is neutral; it requires no moral or ethical element. Cognitive empathy is more of a rational, analytical, or logical process. It means stepping into others' thoughts and emotions, but doing so without feeling or adopting their thoughts and emotions.

Cognitive empathy does not necessarily mean connecting directly to someone's mental processes—the cognition belongs to the one being empathic. One can conceptualize another person's thoughts or conceptualize another person's emotions. From a cognitive empathy perspective, to say that you can see another person's point of view, or can imagine what they feel, does not necessarily mean you value it, regard it as good or bad, or respect it—though cognitive empathy could lead you to one of those evaluations.

Emotional Empathy. This form of empathy is sometimes called affective empathy. This is an emotional process that allows us to feel what others are feeling. Emotional empathy usually means connecting to others' emotions while being similarly emotional yourself. Emotional empathy can offset the coldness of cognitive empathy, preventing us from being aloof to other people's distress. At its best, emotional empathy means responding with healthy emotions to others' emotional states or situations. However, we will often select whom we feel empathy for (cognitively or emotionally) based upon our biases and prejudices, or simply whom we are closest to. Emotional empathy may magnify this tendency, as emotional empathy tends to focus our attention on individual personalities in specific situations instead of larger, more abstract populations. As designers, we might over-respond to a particular individual's stress and overthink a design solution that needs to serve multitudes.

While some emotional empathy can prompt us to action, too much emotional empathy can cause us to be stressed ourselves. We can suffer from emotional contagion, whereby we internalize others' emotions, or we can even spark our own, different emotions, becoming angry at an other's pain, for example. One can also become emotional about another person's confusion or inability to understand a difficult design, in which case our emotions precede and anticipate another person's emotions.

Avoiding emotional contagion can help us be calm and logical when others need our help, but too much coolness will come across as uncaring or clinical. Emotional empathy can be effective in personal relationships, particularly when involving positive and even complementary emotions, but it is often ineffective for understanding people in general. Emotional empathy can cause us to simplify another person's experience in our own mind, thereby doing them an injustice. We can certainly articulate a similar criticism with cognitive empathy.

Compassionate Empathy. Compassionate empathy is sometimes called empathic concern. This identification of empathy is relatively novel compared to the other two and seems to have a bit less agreement at present. In some ways, compassionate empathy is a melding of cognitive and emotional empathy. It eliminates the extremes of being too cerebral and also of being too feeling. Like morals, ethics, etiquette, and law, compassionate empathy seeks to consider the experience of others more abstractly and more universally. Compassionate empathy means I care about your experience, I value your perspective, I give weight to your needs and your emotions, I am mindful of where you are coming from, but I don't get wrapped up in feeling your distress, because that's not useful to you and it is harmful to me. Compassionate empathy is a form that is sometimes attributed to the practice of Buddhism.

Empathy is about others

Related to empathy is the natural tendency that humans, as well as other animals, have toward helping and protecting others. Sometimes this sense of altruism can be unemotional, like cognitive empathy—based on an idea that the world we construct should be helpful to others and safe for their use as a matter of course. Other times, a sense of duty or responsibility to help and protect is connected to an awareness of the suffering of others or of potential danger to others. For the designer, a preference for incorporating ease of use and safety in a design may have to do with a preference for productivity and effectiveness, which can be conceptual and logical as well as altruistic. Even still, the awareness that a design is useful for another relates to the usefulness we would want for ourselves.

When discussing empathy, we have to consider also the actions we take as a result of that empathy. Certainly, that is the entire purpose of empathy in design—to take appropriate actions in creating our designs. Cognitive empathy does not, by definition, imply taking action to improve another person's experience. One often does, but one can also use cognitive empathy to manipulate, exploit, and even torture others. Similarly, emotional empathy can mean getting bogged down in others' emotional states, which can become paralyzing. Emotional empathy can be, in some ways, self-indulgent. Or, in contrast, it can lead to shutting down and safeguarding one's own emotional health in the face of seemingly hopeless distress. In addition, taking on someone's pain can feed into the suffering of the other person, and that gets us nowhere.

Compassionate empathy means showing concern but it is a form of empathy that also facilitates reaching out. Compassionate empathy can foster action where emotional empathy can prompt reaction. Cognitive empathy may or may not motivate action, but compassionate empathy, by some definitions, implies action. Compassionate empathy, by merging the cerebral and the affective, can give us a deeper understanding of other people. When we consider how others might think and feel, we might, with some effort, imagine the complexities and contradictions of their needs, their desires, their expectations, and other ways that they think and feel. We want to open our minds to as many perspectives as possible, so that we aren't simply patronizing our customers or pandering to superficialities of their cultures.

When you step into someone else's shoes, or try to imagine yourself in someone's situation, or try to imagine what another person is thinking or feeling, or try to sort through how you feel about another person's feelings, whether you are being sympathetic, empathic, or compassionate, you are comparing and contrasting your points of view with an abstract other psychology. This is challenging, and can seem sort of unnatural. But the fact is, it is natural for everyone to empathize. Empathy happens when we connect with something innately human.

Some people are more inclined toward empathy than others, and different people are inclined toward different kinds of empathy. In addition, some people have trained their minds toward empathy better than others. So empathy can be both a learned skill and a personal trait. Empathy is situational as well. It is a stance one can adopt in circumstances where it can be used as a tool. It can be a mental state or a point of view one adopts when it is useful to do so.

Empathy involves listening to words and paying attention to nonverbal cues. Over time, when you have listened to feedback from many people, observed their interactions with systems and products, and conceptualized their points of view, you can empathize with an abstract individual rather than a real one. You can become, yourself, a customer instead of a designer when stepping back and considering the product you are designing.

Empathy is about ourselves

Empathy asks us to focus on others. But in many ways, empathy is about addressing our own thinking. The point of empathy is that we are imagining and experiencing what it feels like to be another person. It is important to understand that this is an expansion of our own cognition and emotional intelligence. When we are creating a design or a product for other people, we have already presumed to know the customer and their needs. That's why you make a new product, to satisfy a perceived need. By going into production, we have taken a step toward enhancing others' experiences and this is potentially—perhaps inherently—manipulative.

In some business sensibilities, manipulation is meritorious. In the 21st century, the providing of products and services is increasingly seen as cooperative. Be that as it may, we have a big responsibility when we take control of the design process. We cannot presume to have authority over the experience of others. At the same time, we may be introducing our customers to something we know more about than they do. And certainly we are the ones taking responsibility for a design that no one else has yet created. We have to accommodate other people's values while also recognizing our responsibility to guide and our ability to teach. We have to recognize that our customers know themselves and their needs better than we can predict but, then again, just as we are too close to our designs, the user can be too close to their previous experiences to understand our intentions and adapt to an innovative product. Finally, in too many organizations, how we communicate has less to do with what we give our customers and more to do with what we want for ourselves. Empathy is one way we can remedy arrogance, egoism, and rampant self-interest while determining the best ways to enhance our customers' experiences and grow our customer's consciousness, along with our own.

So-called procrastination

—Creativity—

We all hear a lot about procrastination. The word literally means "to tomorrow." But that says nothing about why we put off doing X.

I think, for me, it's about motivation. I'm more motivated to do X when I can answer these kinds of questions:

• Why do I believe I should do X?
• How does X fit into my larger credo?
• What long term goals does doing X fit into?

This may sound like all too much pointless philosophizing. Aren't we meant to simply get off the couch and do it?

I don't believe so. I've found that, for me, at the root of "procrastination" is a crisis in meaning.

It's an existential dilemma. I don't do something when I don't know why I should. I avoid X if I can't determine that it will benefit me or make me happy or meet my goals . . . or even work right. Or if I can't figure out how to make it work within the chaos of life. Or if I can't seem to make it my X. Or it seems doomed to be waylaid. Is it really worth it? What heroics are called for to make X happen?

Simply getting started may get me motivated for the moment. But so-called procrastination returns quickly. And it happens when I can't foresee fitting X into a system of activities that arrives at a state of being in the future that matters to me. In itself, completing X isn't a strong enough goal to counter the weight of all of life's burdens challenging X.

For example, I signed up for an online class several weeks ago (wherein they teach about procrastination, as it happens) but for two weeks I couldn't get motivated to start on it.

However, it was only yesterday that I had the opportunity to construct a six-week path through coursework in this and a number of other classes. Now I have a strategy. So I probably won't avoid doing the lessons at this point—I'm motivated by my plan.

Furthermore, I have also been busy for the last few weeks (instead of doing the lessons) constructing a career plan that this class fits into. So now I have some very specific, concrete reasons for taking this class. And I have evidence that there is a logic to what I am doing, because I am doing research about my goals. This gives me enthusiasm about doing something I might have put off. Now I will approach my lessons more directly, more forcefully, more intentionally, more confidently.

Yet if I didn't know why I was taking the class, if I was simply wandering through it, just vaguely feeling like it was a good idea, I might not be so motivated. I'd get through the intro video, but then there would be the unexpected overtime, the funeral, the cat sitting, the turning point in a commission, the vacation planning, the homework for the career coach, the unexpected house guest . . . and I would blow off the class and watch Youtube while drinking a beer and I would put off the second lesson until tomorrow.

Procrastination.  Pro-crastinus.  To tomorrow.

Fortunately, however, I've transferred into a new session of the course that began this week and I've already finished most of the first week's work. So far, so good. This time I'm on track. But at some point in the coming weeks of the course, I will have an existential crisis. I will say, when faced with the next online lesson, "what is the point of this?"

I could follow some "procrastination tips" but many of those are simply immediate solutions. They are designed to help me to avoid putting off the online class. What I really need, however, is to find clarification that I am not crazy and that completing the lesson is a really good idea. It's a good idea because it's an integral part of a larger plan where it compounds with other tasks to construct success and happiness. I can use a little trick to counter so-called procrastination and get me started, but very quickly I'm going to need to place my activity within a larger scope of meaning.

Finding meaning in the next class lesson that relates to long-term goals is important. Also, taking a long term stance helps me determine when I should do something right now, when to strategically stall, and when it would be wiser (and safe) to assign something to a later date. That way, I'm not feeling like a bum for letting tomorrow actually have some tasks.

And also being heroic. Being heroic is important. Because this does appear to be a fight.

Online learning outside the accredited university

—Another art—

I have begun the process of studying "coding" through an online learning website. It is not an accredited college, this website. But that doesn't matter to me. In fact, even though I've completed several college degrees, I find the idea of online learning outside of traditional schools more valid than ever. To be credentialed by a source that does not charge thousands of dollars a class seems, in some ways, more credible than a degree from an institution that treated my education like a cash cow. I'm not even sure that a certificate matters to me—I'm doing the free version of the class.

So why the new attitude about traditional college degrees? Well, in retrospect, I can see that there were problems at some of the colleges I studied at.

At first, everything was good. In 1985, I began taking college classes at a community college. That was fine. Tuition was affordable, the classes were practical, and I was studying with people of all ages from all different backgrounds. I felt a tangible, rather than simply theoretical, connection to a long history of ideas.

Years later, however, studying first toward a PhD and then changing to an MFA, I found the following situations new and alarming:

• At a private, for-profit school, upon contacting the university, a recruiter had me enrolled and had set up financial aid before we hung up from that first phone inquiry. Acceptance was a foregone conclusion. He pushed a button and the university coffers filled to overflowing as money gushed from the pipelines of the banks and the US Department of Education.
• I became immediately dependent upon student loans as a source of sustainable income. In this terribly inequitable economy, I never had as good a job as being a student.
• On the other hand, one single class at a private school in 2017 costs about the same as a whole school year of full-course-load-plus terms in 1985. And the prospects for jobs upon graduation are no better in 2017. This is due largely, of course, to my proclivity toward creative rather than practical pursuits. But let's be honest, both impracticality and costliness have soared side-by-side over the last few decades. Now, with a humanities degree, you hardly even get a chance.
• Like other institutions, the university is "top-down." Many professors who made it to a position of authority got there by being low-key, easy to get along with, agreeable, and sometimes even mediocre (some by nature and some for survival) and then spent their energy keeping the talented students from challenging them too much (in the students' best interests, if mediocrity and conformity are the measures). A good number of these authorities reserved the right to declare truth in the classroom even when their assertions were as patently erroneous as to be laughable in any normal space of discourse.There were brilliant lecturers, too, of course. But I'm listing my concerns, here.
• As far as networking with professors is concerned, many of them rewarded compliance and had less than passionate interest in furthering our careers. Often this was simply because of their isolation from any career but one—that of university teaching. I never felt I was mentored by a large percent of my professors, though I felt like most of them had well-meaning advice to share. Even still, we were in school, not the labor force; the advice was usually about studies.
• Even while some professors may have felt threatened a bit by us students, as a whole they had no problem inviting us into the pyramid scheme whereby we paid for the hopes of one day beating our peers to the throne of our own professorship. But these days, as full-time faculty positions have all but been decimated, this pyramid scheme starts to feel as hopeless as a Ponzi scheme. Still, profs will helpfully illuminate the merits and rewards of making it through the dissertation. You can't help but learn a lot, if nothing else. And there are, of course, rewards in that.
• But speaking of sucking people in, two schools I attended regularly recruited their undergrads to return and be grad students, exploiting them for cheap labor as overworked TAs, and then hired the same folks to be their (ultimately non-tenured, part-time or contract) faculty. This inbreeding has repercussions. Both of these schools displayed an identical tendency toward polar factions in areas of research, in clear differentiation from each other: straight realism on one side and pure abstraction on the other. I blame their institutional provincialism for this. Nothing "in between" was tolerated.  At one of the schools an attempt toward anything other than those choices was treated as an impossibility.
• Much of the most important learning that I gained came from my own efforts to study beyond the course curriculum. I was self-directed, despite the regimented programs, but learning for learning's sake was constantly undermined by learning for earning credentials. Or at least learning for learning how to "learn." Compliance was rewarded over broader competence.
• Speaking of learning to learn (and to clarify my use of the phrase), many of the courses I took reinforced bad ways of learning by rewarding us with grades immediately upon completing tasks instead of evaluating us over time when we could have proved retention. In other cases, we were taught how to pass tests instead of how to drill our memory, practice competence, illustrate expertise, or communicate ideas. Predicting the teacher's biases became a skill. While I definitely learned a lot about research and note taking and reading and writing and comprehension and, certainly, thinking, there were times when I engaged in the best forms of study only to be punished when I quickly found myself more knowledgeable than I ought to have been.
• But there were superficialities in other ways, too. Professors engaged in an economy of fifty-cent words that they had no intention of ever really granting deep meaning to: buzzwords and sacred texts used as currency to secure their positions. In retrospect, the so-called leftist philosophers couldn't have been more fundamentalist in their thinking, an odd mix of puritanism, pragmatism, and positivism in drag as progressive thought. I'm talking US universities, here. I have no idea what it's like elsewhere.
• This kind of ideology became increasingly apparent to me the more I studied. I enrolled in an intro class that required only one text book, written by one author, with no references to the history of thought about the subject, no accounting of the contributions of important thinkers on the subject, and absolutely zero citations. Just this one ultra-conservative maverick whom conservative think tanks wouldn't even align with. We called the class "Intro to Economics."
• And while we are on the subject of textbooks. Many classes required textbooks that cost upwards of two hundred dollars apiece. Some were even paperbacks. Almost all were revised (the order of the chapters changed) at least yearly—often every term—to force us to buy them new. Our quizzes came from the questions at the ends of the chapters, which were changed every edition. Sometimes the books were written by the prof or the department and published by the university. They were always twelve inches wide so we couldn't photocopy them. When asked by students to place the textbook on reserve in the library, the instructors would stall and make excuses—they were instructed by their departments to do so. In other, more succinct words, we were treated as captive customers rather than apprentices or eager learners.
• One school even manufactured their own (not quite up to par) supplies and sold them on a website that was designed to look independent, registered by a third party registrant to hide their contact information from us. They then required those supplies for their classes, forcing us to pay quite a bit for them. They did, at least, allow us to resell them to other students at the end of the course.
• To legitimize and market their teaching and to satisfy accreditation, the universities would delude themselves with outrageous conceits of how their products work and how they would deliver them. One school claimed their online program was identical to their onsite program, and instead of promoting the differing strengths of each, attempted to construct the most incredible "virtual reality" for the online students, trying to force them to treat two dimensions as actual objects, and compelling the remote students (and the instructors) to keep their "in-class work" and "homework" straight. To add insult to injury, they would deny resources to the online students to thwart "cheating."

Ah, so much bile; such choler. Over the last hour, as I write this, these are the memories that I have dredged up while grumbling a bit too much about the dark side of college. Such antics as I have described can exist in non-accredited online learning, too. Heck, some online learning is the very epitome of pyramid scheming. But if the instructor of the online course turns out to be a pedantic ideologue with a specious agenda or a scammer trying to bleed me? Click-off, scroll, next course. Money back. I didn't invest much capital anyway. Probably it was free.

Sure there is some garbage out there. Possibly a lot. But the online courses I've begun to look at (particularly ones taught by industry pros and not academics at a university) seem like they are sharing knowledge with the next cohort of initiates, with the intention of strengthening fields and industries that have not yet run dry. I hope that's the case. The really good courses get numbers of students that a traditional school can't imagine, so that could prove to be a problem very quickly. For now, at any rate, online courses are at least instantly accessible and radically less expensive.  The red brick and mortar universities, with their relationships to student loans, have become like hospitals that drain medicare, medicaid, and health insurance with exaggerated costs and over-billing. It's a feeding frenzy on the gravy train. Hopefully online courses fair well on competition and don't become mass markets for billions of students competing for thousands of jobs.

If nothing else, online learning promises to be a democratic market place where students can credential themselves by virtue of their own drive to succeed, be awarded on their merits from peers and from their own knowledge of the subjects rather than the approval of a committee with its petty agendas and desperate infighting despite all its best intentions and hands-on mentoring.

Don't misunderstand my feelings about college. It was a good ride. But no one ever looks at my transcripts. No one knows I likely have the equivalent in credits of an art history degree. Online studies may actually change that paradigm in the future. Self-credentialing online means I can present my competencies by subject. I can say, Yes I know this. And this. And this, too. But not this. This one doesn't fit my career goals. It's about all the important things I've become competent at, not a degree that titles me. Of course, I'm waxing poetic about studying JavaScript online when, as an undergrad, I drank java while listening to poetry in cafés. These are apples and oranges.

And that may be the most important insight. Online learning outside a degree program means I can learn while engaging directly with the new professional field that interests me. If I need to learn something, I buckle in, knuckle down and learn what is essential to know NOW and start using it NOW. Not five years from now. It feels far more practical. Which makes me wonder why going to college on a campus to gain a liberal arts education ever should have been about a job. Doesn't it make sense to go to college for a few years simply to learn how to think and to get a great background. Isn't that enough? Maybe even figure out your calling as a human beyond that of a worker.

And then, after that, after you graduate, gather the practical knowledge for an income earning job and do the learning online in just a year or two. You know how they announce a shortage in an industry and people run out and get a four-year degree while we suffer four years of shortages in that industry and then suddenly there are too many people in the industry four years later? Let's not do that.

For liberal arts and for my studio art adventures, going to a physical college was great. There was very little hope for employment following the path of literature, poetry, philosophy. But I learned a lot about thinking. Looking back, I am disappointed by how much nonsense was circulating as "thought." But there was a lot of good thought, too. Didn't I lie on the college green reading thousands of pages of Dostoevsky and Kafka and Chekov and Tolstoy and Turgenev?

Yet, going to a college campus in the rolling hills to acquire technical skills that I can market in this new economy, alongside my fine art? I don't see why I don't just sit at the computer and learn that part online.  Especially since self-directed learning suits the entrepreneurial (and creative) spirit better.

This is down-and-dirty day job stuff.

Will it work? Well, let's see.

Looking Back

—Creativity—

I have a couple articles that I have been planning to publish online, on sites for scholars and university professors. I had been thinking about publishing one of them tonight. But I am here, instead, reading old posts.

But that is a good thing, because the writing on this blog is giving me confidence. I don't know if the latest article is good or not. I just finished it and I can't comprehend it clearly. It's too fresh, and I'm buried too deep in it. But by going back and re-reading the posts here, I get a sense that my writing is where I want it to be. So my new article must measure up to my demands for myself. It is probably just as good as the posts here are.

Well, there's nothing profound about seeing the value in looking at old work. I've always thought it is a good idea to turn canvases to the wall, or squirrel drawings away in portfolios and dresser drawers. Given a month or more, one can see them fresh, almost with the eyes of a brand-new viewer, if only for a few seconds.

My mother has given me an old, framed woodblock print. A week or so ago, I hung something in it's place above her kitchen bins and took the print to hang in my room. My brother-in-law noted something about it and so I started looking at it again. It's all about something different, now. It's not about the process or what I struggled with. In a way, it's more about the subject than ever before. The subject is a little barn for a couple goats. The goats aren't in the picture. Back when I made it, it was more about the print than the barn. But now I remember the barn.

But even when I look at the print, I see everything. It is so easy to look at and everything is readable. I no longer (and this took a long time) feel that there are failures here and there in the piece. Everything is just right. My brother-in-law says there is sophistication that I probably don't even notice. But now I am looking for it--to see if I can tell what it is that he sees.

So, looking over these old posts is good. I see that I was right about some things that, in the time that has passed since writing them, have unfolded before me in the ways that I had predicted they would. I see that I was not unreasonable in my assessments of the world of art. And I see that I do, after all, know how to construct a paragraph and a sentence. Or even a well-placed fragment.

How far back can we find artist statements?

—The art world—

I often wonder, when did we first start seeing all this emphasis on artist statements?

Tonight I came across a letter written from Camille Pissarro to Paul Durand-Ruel. It is dated November 6, 1886 and in it Pissarro writes:

My Dear M. Durand-Ruel, I am sending you the enclosed account of myself and my new artistic doctrines that you requested.

In the letter, Pissarro includes a short artist statement—his artistic doctrines—which he titles Theory. The statement explains his influences, his process, and his philosophy, each in one of three short paragraphs of one to two sentences. It is a model artist statement, even if he didn't call it that.

He follows the statement with a short biography, which he refers to as such. "Here is my biography," he writes. Notably, he focuses on his literal history—where he was born, and where he has worked and traveled prior to his involvement with the Impressionist movement. He doesn't list accomplishments and honors.

So here we have a modern example of the artist statement and artist biography requested by a dealer dating to the late 19th century.

Art and the Internet

More and more it is becoming obvious that one can define him or herself as an expert and develop a presence on the internet. I think we have reached a point where people need to self-credential themselves instead of going for degrees and they have to reach the customer directly instead of going through employers, publishers, distributors, or agents. Teaching and publishing online is definitely a stronger possibility now than traditional career routes.

Backing up

—Tip—

Here's a quick tip for bloggers. If your blog host has a way to export your blog post data, you can download your entire blog to a text or xml file in case something bad happens. I do this regularly with my blog. Everything I've written here is also on my hard drive at home, just in case. I also have my lesson plan posts printed in color and bound in a three-ring binder as a teaching portfolio. I don't expect Google to lose my blog, but you never know.