Monday, June 30, 2014
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.
Monday, June 2, 2014
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.
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.
Monday, May 26, 2014
Building a flying machine
—Creativity—
Here's a good analogy for some aspects of the creative process.
Suppose you wanted to make a flying machine. You might start by emulating a bird and you might construct a vehicle with flapping wings. And people might call you a moron and you might feel like an idiot because the thing looks like a bird but doesn't fly at all. Eventually you might get it to work a little, but not much.
Sooner or later, however, you make some adjustments and now the wings are static and the airplane is invented. You started with the idea of the bird, but what you really needed to make was an airplane. Yet, you had no idea what an airplane was in the beginning. So you had to start with the bird, even though you couldn't really make a mechanical bird
The interesting thing is that, in the final product, the bird is there after all. The airplane has wings. People say it looks like a bird. But you had to focus on the lift and the soaring of the bird and find a different way to propel the craft. It had to be kind of like a bird, but its own thing. The flying machine you finally invent does share attributes with birds, but obviously not all of their attributes.
Art is similar. You start with a strong idea, like the idea of the bird. You try hard. You try too hard. The idea is too prevalent, too prominent, too central. You work too literally around the idea. And the result is very weak art. It just doesn't work. It won't fly.
But then, through the process of working out what works and what doesn't, through this process of elimination, you end up somewhere just a little to the left of where you started. You arrive at something you couldn't have predicted, but which, undeniably, satisfies your initial goals. Like the bird in the airplane, the idea is intact, integrated in a way you had not expected, and you could not have foreseen.
Here's a good analogy for some aspects of the creative process.
Suppose you wanted to make a flying machine. You might start by emulating a bird and you might construct a vehicle with flapping wings. And people might call you a moron and you might feel like an idiot because the thing looks like a bird but doesn't fly at all. Eventually you might get it to work a little, but not much.
Sooner or later, however, you make some adjustments and now the wings are static and the airplane is invented. You started with the idea of the bird, but what you really needed to make was an airplane. Yet, you had no idea what an airplane was in the beginning. So you had to start with the bird, even though you couldn't really make a mechanical bird
The interesting thing is that, in the final product, the bird is there after all. The airplane has wings. People say it looks like a bird. But you had to focus on the lift and the soaring of the bird and find a different way to propel the craft. It had to be kind of like a bird, but its own thing. The flying machine you finally invent does share attributes with birds, but obviously not all of their attributes.
Art is similar. You start with a strong idea, like the idea of the bird. You try hard. You try too hard. The idea is too prevalent, too prominent, too central. You work too literally around the idea. And the result is very weak art. It just doesn't work. It won't fly.
But then, through the process of working out what works and what doesn't, through this process of elimination, you end up somewhere just a little to the left of where you started. You arrive at something you couldn't have predicted, but which, undeniably, satisfies your initial goals. Like the bird in the airplane, the idea is intact, integrated in a way you had not expected, and you could not have foreseen.
Thursday, May 15, 2014
Process and product
—Creativity—
How we love to tear reality into two pieces and color these pieces as extreme opposites. In art-education parlance, process is on the good side and product is on the bad side—particularly for teaching the youngest artists. But I don't see it this way.
As an art educator, I've seen this dyad at its extremes, and my feeling is that both process and product are equally important, but at their extremes are pretty useless. That's because process should be the way to get to a product. Without a product, process is aimless noodling. Without a process, product is mindless mimicry.
Now, I should immediately define my terms and differentiate my concept of process and product from the way they are conventionally understood. For me, process in art is a series of actions taken to achieve a finished, public artwork. Product is that artwork. I don't practice or teach art as an isolated personal activity performed entirely for one's own enjoyment. That might be part of it, but in my thinking, art is communication and that involves a work that is finished and then shared through display. This is just one approach, but I believe it works. As a counterexample to my uses of process and product, I offer a couple ways I've seen other teachers focus exclusively on one or the other, to my horror and, I believe, to the disservice of the student. I admit these are extremes, but I was there and I was required to participate.
Picture the creative arts day care that favors process. These teachers see process as experimentation. Children's self-esteem requires that they direct their own activity and the important thing is that we give them room and freedom to explore their materials. For example, we will remove most of their clothing and let them get paint and other materials all over their bodies. They can scramble all over huge sheets of paper together in collaboration. They won't take the result home, but I have them hang it in their class space to share. We let them discover by experience how paint feels, how it sticks, how it smears and mixes. Some of the materials we give them won't make conventional art. We foam them up from head to foot with shaving cream and let them explore tactile qualities knowing that it is impossible to make any product of it. We let them build sculptures and knock them down again and again.
None of this is without value and some of it is essential. But what is missing is the sense that, ultimately, art is about communicating with other people through display. I don't believe it is harmful to start teaching this early. If a child is old enough for art, he or she is old enough to conceive of process as leading to a conclusion, regardless of how permanent or public it is. An extreme concept of process favors a particularly contemporary attitude of instant gratification and self-indulgence that is not really in tune with art-making. At an extreme, it completely ignores the existence of rules in art, natural or human-made and misses the point of communication. The only argument I can see for this type of process-oriented pedagogy is that it is age-appropriate for very young children. I disagree entirely with that argument, however, and later in the post I will offer an example from my own childhood to argue against a pedagogy that favors process to the exclusion of product.
Before we get ahead of ourselves, however, let's look at the most problematic kind of product-oriented pedagogy I've seen. We've all experienced the activity that starts with a paper plate in front of every chair filled with an array of pieces of construction paper, cotton balls, pipe cleaners, and tongue depressors. Some of the pieces are traced out and cut in advance by the teacher. This is the enemy that process-oriented educators see when we utter the word product. But this is an extreme way of teaching art, however common it is. Look at what we start with: every seat has the exact same array of objects, down to the same colors. The object of this game is for every student to carefully follow the directions that result in a complete object that Mom will love to put on the refrigerator. It is extremely important for every child to write his or her name neatly on the finished project. This is because the child will hardly be able to tell their's from the other children's, or even if they can, the teacher won't be able to.
But what are these kids signing off on when they lay that signature down? Forcing a child to take authorship for something he or she didn't really create is only half an art activity and yet people love to do this. Some people will explain that it's the best way to teach little children, saving more creativity for adult classes. The only argument I can conceive of for this type of product-oriented pedagogy is that it teaches the student to take concrete steps and that there needs to be a process to follow in order to accomplish something. But I disagree entirely with that argument (and I imagine more sinister or at least lazy reasons for the activity, anyway). And now it's time to share an example from my own childhood to argue for a pedagogy of process and product that utilizes a balance of individual creativity, teacher-directed rules, personal preference, and a concrete audience.
When I was a child, we had a holiday tradition in our home that has affected me greatly as an artist. Every year, in those days, we would receive scores of Christmas cards from friends and family and at the end of the season the used cards went in a box for the next year. A month or so before Christmas, we would excavate this box and another box of supplies and tackle the annual ritual of making hand-made Christmas cards for our own recipients out of recycled commercial holiday cards. The trick was to cut out words and pictures from the old cards and rearrange them into our own unique creations. Part of the fun was picking the cards to start with. Looking through the old cards, one was able to imagine possibilities and try them out. We had to share diplomatically since we would all end up with unique material to work with. In the event that there were duplicate cards, two of us could come up with unique responses to the same material. This is another interesting difference between our experience and the extremes I cited above: our experience reinforced group dynamics, while the first two extreme examples I related offer little development in collaborative skills.
Mom had showed us several methods that we all used. First of all, we had a way of folding and gluing a sheet of construction paper into a card. Secondly, we employed a method of gluing glitter. We also had a formula for making an envelope out of more construction paper. I'm sure we had other tricks of the trade that Mom had learned herself or had invented, and the kids probably came up with some tricks of our own. The cutting up of old cards involved pretty universal methods for cutting—although one of us is left-handed—but the way we extracted the images from the cards was all our own. Mom gave us no rules for how we composed our creations, other than that they had to be mailable.
This yearly project was a perfect recipe for teaching creativity. We had a process that was open-ended to an extent, but had the kinds of limitations that help us focus and problem-solve. We had some rules to follow and freedom to imagine our own creations, too. And we returned to this project again and again, through two decades of our collective childhoods. To this day, I am convinced that my creative process is informed by these early experiences every Christmas. From a very early age, I created product with my family and it didn't hurt me one bit.
Product is an essential conclusion to the creative process. When we made these Christmas cards, one of the foremost thoughts in our minds was about how the recipients would view them. Audience was an essential element of the process because, as we created, we played the role of the recipient in our minds as we played the role of the artist with our hands and eyes. Children love to share their art with others. In fact, they hardly have any interest in keeping it for themselves until they are older. This supports the idea that young children are more concerned with process, even as it supports the conclusion that children practice communication through the sharing of meaningful visual objects.
Some teachers will use modern artists as examples of process over product, which simply isn't true. Picasso and Van Gogh were extremely serious about their products and it is a misconception that their art is entirely personal and lacks academic convention. Where would anyone get such an idea if they were really looking at the art by these artists? And yet I just saw a show of Van Gogh's work in which the wall text exclaimed surprise at the careful compositions where a fury of emotional activity was expected! What damage have we've done to our ideas of creativity through our collective conceit of process as wild emotion? We value personal expression. This is fine. But the idea of process as loose emotion that we've shamelessly projected back upon the earlier modernists (let alone the later ones with the moniker Abstract Expressionist) is one that some educators now impose unquestioningly upon our children in the names of freedom and self-expression.
We live in a world in which most people survive, somehow, with little understanding of process. I encounter this all the time. Adults don't understand how most things work, they don't understand the steps required to accomplish things, and they constantly miss the big picture. We aren't doing people favors teaching them that process is a self-absorbed activity that has nothing to do with other people or with a successful product, let alone composition. But we also live in a very conventional society that, for all its emphasis on self-interest, doesn't reward those who leave the path we've beaten down into quagmire. We aren't doing people any favors if we don't teach that personal creativity is part of a social equation.
Depth in meaning cannot come about from pure process. Engaging in process alone won't require that others (or even the artist) understand it. And an uncreative product, devoid of a personal method, also has no depth of meaning because it just reiterates the same tired clichés. Only through a balance of convention and personal expression can deeper meaning be constructed and shared. This is essential, I believe, for the best art education as I practice it just as it is essential for my practice of art making.
How we love to tear reality into two pieces and color these pieces as extreme opposites. In art-education parlance, process is on the good side and product is on the bad side—particularly for teaching the youngest artists. But I don't see it this way.
As an art educator, I've seen this dyad at its extremes, and my feeling is that both process and product are equally important, but at their extremes are pretty useless. That's because process should be the way to get to a product. Without a product, process is aimless noodling. Without a process, product is mindless mimicry.
Now, I should immediately define my terms and differentiate my concept of process and product from the way they are conventionally understood. For me, process in art is a series of actions taken to achieve a finished, public artwork. Product is that artwork. I don't practice or teach art as an isolated personal activity performed entirely for one's own enjoyment. That might be part of it, but in my thinking, art is communication and that involves a work that is finished and then shared through display. This is just one approach, but I believe it works. As a counterexample to my uses of process and product, I offer a couple ways I've seen other teachers focus exclusively on one or the other, to my horror and, I believe, to the disservice of the student. I admit these are extremes, but I was there and I was required to participate.
Picture the creative arts day care that favors process. These teachers see process as experimentation. Children's self-esteem requires that they direct their own activity and the important thing is that we give them room and freedom to explore their materials. For example, we will remove most of their clothing and let them get paint and other materials all over their bodies. They can scramble all over huge sheets of paper together in collaboration. They won't take the result home, but I have them hang it in their class space to share. We let them discover by experience how paint feels, how it sticks, how it smears and mixes. Some of the materials we give them won't make conventional art. We foam them up from head to foot with shaving cream and let them explore tactile qualities knowing that it is impossible to make any product of it. We let them build sculptures and knock them down again and again.
None of this is without value and some of it is essential. But what is missing is the sense that, ultimately, art is about communicating with other people through display. I don't believe it is harmful to start teaching this early. If a child is old enough for art, he or she is old enough to conceive of process as leading to a conclusion, regardless of how permanent or public it is. An extreme concept of process favors a particularly contemporary attitude of instant gratification and self-indulgence that is not really in tune with art-making. At an extreme, it completely ignores the existence of rules in art, natural or human-made and misses the point of communication. The only argument I can see for this type of process-oriented pedagogy is that it is age-appropriate for very young children. I disagree entirely with that argument, however, and later in the post I will offer an example from my own childhood to argue against a pedagogy that favors process to the exclusion of product.
Before we get ahead of ourselves, however, let's look at the most problematic kind of product-oriented pedagogy I've seen. We've all experienced the activity that starts with a paper plate in front of every chair filled with an array of pieces of construction paper, cotton balls, pipe cleaners, and tongue depressors. Some of the pieces are traced out and cut in advance by the teacher. This is the enemy that process-oriented educators see when we utter the word product. But this is an extreme way of teaching art, however common it is. Look at what we start with: every seat has the exact same array of objects, down to the same colors. The object of this game is for every student to carefully follow the directions that result in a complete object that Mom will love to put on the refrigerator. It is extremely important for every child to write his or her name neatly on the finished project. This is because the child will hardly be able to tell their's from the other children's, or even if they can, the teacher won't be able to.
But what are these kids signing off on when they lay that signature down? Forcing a child to take authorship for something he or she didn't really create is only half an art activity and yet people love to do this. Some people will explain that it's the best way to teach little children, saving more creativity for adult classes. The only argument I can conceive of for this type of product-oriented pedagogy is that it teaches the student to take concrete steps and that there needs to be a process to follow in order to accomplish something. But I disagree entirely with that argument (and I imagine more sinister or at least lazy reasons for the activity, anyway). And now it's time to share an example from my own childhood to argue for a pedagogy of process and product that utilizes a balance of individual creativity, teacher-directed rules, personal preference, and a concrete audience.
When I was a child, we had a holiday tradition in our home that has affected me greatly as an artist. Every year, in those days, we would receive scores of Christmas cards from friends and family and at the end of the season the used cards went in a box for the next year. A month or so before Christmas, we would excavate this box and another box of supplies and tackle the annual ritual of making hand-made Christmas cards for our own recipients out of recycled commercial holiday cards. The trick was to cut out words and pictures from the old cards and rearrange them into our own unique creations. Part of the fun was picking the cards to start with. Looking through the old cards, one was able to imagine possibilities and try them out. We had to share diplomatically since we would all end up with unique material to work with. In the event that there were duplicate cards, two of us could come up with unique responses to the same material. This is another interesting difference between our experience and the extremes I cited above: our experience reinforced group dynamics, while the first two extreme examples I related offer little development in collaborative skills.
Mom had showed us several methods that we all used. First of all, we had a way of folding and gluing a sheet of construction paper into a card. Secondly, we employed a method of gluing glitter. We also had a formula for making an envelope out of more construction paper. I'm sure we had other tricks of the trade that Mom had learned herself or had invented, and the kids probably came up with some tricks of our own. The cutting up of old cards involved pretty universal methods for cutting—although one of us is left-handed—but the way we extracted the images from the cards was all our own. Mom gave us no rules for how we composed our creations, other than that they had to be mailable.
This yearly project was a perfect recipe for teaching creativity. We had a process that was open-ended to an extent, but had the kinds of limitations that help us focus and problem-solve. We had some rules to follow and freedom to imagine our own creations, too. And we returned to this project again and again, through two decades of our collective childhoods. To this day, I am convinced that my creative process is informed by these early experiences every Christmas. From a very early age, I created product with my family and it didn't hurt me one bit.
Product is an essential conclusion to the creative process. When we made these Christmas cards, one of the foremost thoughts in our minds was about how the recipients would view them. Audience was an essential element of the process because, as we created, we played the role of the recipient in our minds as we played the role of the artist with our hands and eyes. Children love to share their art with others. In fact, they hardly have any interest in keeping it for themselves until they are older. This supports the idea that young children are more concerned with process, even as it supports the conclusion that children practice communication through the sharing of meaningful visual objects.
Some teachers will use modern artists as examples of process over product, which simply isn't true. Picasso and Van Gogh were extremely serious about their products and it is a misconception that their art is entirely personal and lacks academic convention. Where would anyone get such an idea if they were really looking at the art by these artists? And yet I just saw a show of Van Gogh's work in which the wall text exclaimed surprise at the careful compositions where a fury of emotional activity was expected! What damage have we've done to our ideas of creativity through our collective conceit of process as wild emotion? We value personal expression. This is fine. But the idea of process as loose emotion that we've shamelessly projected back upon the earlier modernists (let alone the later ones with the moniker Abstract Expressionist) is one that some educators now impose unquestioningly upon our children in the names of freedom and self-expression.
We live in a world in which most people survive, somehow, with little understanding of process. I encounter this all the time. Adults don't understand how most things work, they don't understand the steps required to accomplish things, and they constantly miss the big picture. We aren't doing people favors teaching them that process is a self-absorbed activity that has nothing to do with other people or with a successful product, let alone composition. But we also live in a very conventional society that, for all its emphasis on self-interest, doesn't reward those who leave the path we've beaten down into quagmire. We aren't doing people any favors if we don't teach that personal creativity is part of a social equation.
Depth in meaning cannot come about from pure process. Engaging in process alone won't require that others (or even the artist) understand it. And an uncreative product, devoid of a personal method, also has no depth of meaning because it just reiterates the same tired clichés. Only through a balance of convention and personal expression can deeper meaning be constructed and shared. This is essential, I believe, for the best art education as I practice it just as it is essential for my practice of art making.
Wednesday, April 16, 2014
Time + Money + Resources, Part IV
—The art world—
For several posts, I have been exploring this formula for artistic success: time plus money plus resources. Recently, I have found another twist to the concept. Some expenses are timed expenses. Every month I have to pay something toward the resources that run my studio: my phones, my insurance, my gas, my electricity, my alarm system, my Web hosting and domain registration, my rent, my water, my post-office box, and my internet connection. Whether I used these or not, I have to pay for them within a limited period of time and often at higher than residential rates. I have a limited amount of time to spend paying for them. I am not flush with time so it is costing me time as well as money.
This is a double whammy. In my formula of time plus money plus resources, I have a limited amount of time to pay these bills, and I cannot grow this time. As I am limited in one of the variables, my chances of growing things in my favor are severely disadvantaged. Meanwhile, if I can't pay on time, the cost relative to time increases as the bills pile up and fees and interest are added. The only way to view such a situation is to understand that it is rigged against me. It's costing me time twice.
With this knowledge I can make a decision that seems increasingly logical and necessary: I can eliminate as many cyclical expenses as possible, replacing them with expenses that recur only when I can afford them. For example, I can add minutes to my phone when I have money and if I don't, I don't. Another way to combat this situation is by collaborating with others and sharing resources so that we can double the time relative to money and resources used. In doing so, I buy myself time and money, with only a partial decrease in resources proving again that this formula tends to move in one of two directions: increasing or decreasing exponentially.
For several posts, I have been exploring this formula for artistic success: time plus money plus resources. Recently, I have found another twist to the concept. Some expenses are timed expenses. Every month I have to pay something toward the resources that run my studio: my phones, my insurance, my gas, my electricity, my alarm system, my Web hosting and domain registration, my rent, my water, my post-office box, and my internet connection. Whether I used these or not, I have to pay for them within a limited period of time and often at higher than residential rates. I have a limited amount of time to spend paying for them. I am not flush with time so it is costing me time as well as money.
This is a double whammy. In my formula of time plus money plus resources, I have a limited amount of time to pay these bills, and I cannot grow this time. As I am limited in one of the variables, my chances of growing things in my favor are severely disadvantaged. Meanwhile, if I can't pay on time, the cost relative to time increases as the bills pile up and fees and interest are added. The only way to view such a situation is to understand that it is rigged against me. It's costing me time twice.
With this knowledge I can make a decision that seems increasingly logical and necessary: I can eliminate as many cyclical expenses as possible, replacing them with expenses that recur only when I can afford them. For example, I can add minutes to my phone when I have money and if I don't, I don't. Another way to combat this situation is by collaborating with others and sharing resources so that we can double the time relative to money and resources used. In doing so, I buy myself time and money, with only a partial decrease in resources proving again that this formula tends to move in one of two directions: increasing or decreasing exponentially.
Mentoring as a viewer and life-long student
—Art education—
When I was studying art at a university, recently, I was sometimes subjected to an attitude that I think was not at all helpful. Sometimes, my teachers came to my work with an expectation of failure. They came to view the painting armed with rules and almost eagerly scanning the work for any areas that broke these rules. Instead of looking at the work as incompletely edited, they regarded it as mistakes that can't be resolved. Some of this comes from an ala prima mindset: a painting must come about through a series of deft brushstrokes so thoroughly schooled that the finished work is evidence of a flawless performance. But some of the attitude is based on a misunderstanding of mentoring.
I think a better way to look at a student's work is to respond to it as a viewer, and teach how it is working and not yet working with the expectation that the student will find ways to edit the work to expand on successes and resolve difficulties. My attitude is simply that a problematic work is not yet complete and that the student requires a fresh set of eyes to identify the discords. But only the artist can resolve those discords, and only through working on the piece. Very often, no one—teacher or student—can predict the method of resolution; it comes only through reworking.
Rather than negating the student's work as broken, then, my method is to reinforce the work as transitional. Either the work will lead to a better finished version or it will lead to a better next painting. Instead of saying, you didn't do thus and so it is flawed the teacher should say the painting is doing thus and that's not working. Instead of saying you should do thus to fix it, the teacher should say play with it to see what might resolve the problem; maybe the painting will suggest something to you as you work on it.The difference between these two attitudes is striking. In the first, the teacher is the authority and the student is lacking. In the second, the painting is lacking, but the painting itself is respected as the final authority and the student, not the teacher, is empowered to bring the art to life by listening to the painting, not by adhering to the teacher's commands.
My method of teaching comes from a particular standpoint that contrasts with the traditional top-down attitude of superiority that is common to institutional education. Instead of treating the student as a novice lacking knowledge that I possess, I treat the student as a natural in transition while I see myself as an experienced mentor.
All good artists are life-long students, struggling to make their art come alive. I understand the student because I am a student. I understand the student's art because I understand art. But no one knows the student's motivation and direction better than the student. It is true that the student cannot see the work as fresh as my eyes can. Instead of being prescriptive in my feedback, however, I am descriptive: I share with the student what works and what doesn't work to my mind and eyes. I don't presume to know how to proceed—I can only make some general and very open-ended suggestions that are based on a very rigorous knowledge of the fundamentals and principles of art and design.
For this reason, it is extremely important that the student is given the opportunity to finish the art before presenting it for feedback. Very likely the work will be in a draft stage, but it will be in a finished first or second or third state. It is not fair to ambush a student's unfinished work with prescriptive advice or admonishments of incompetence. This is not about self-esteem, it's about fairness. As a teacher, I can have no idea what a student is trying to accomplish until the work is completely presented. Then what is resolved and not resolved are clear. At this point, I can respond as a viewer to the work and offer feedback about what's working or not working, given a more solid understanding of the intent of the artist.
When I was studying art at a university, recently, I was sometimes subjected to an attitude that I think was not at all helpful. Sometimes, my teachers came to my work with an expectation of failure. They came to view the painting armed with rules and almost eagerly scanning the work for any areas that broke these rules. Instead of looking at the work as incompletely edited, they regarded it as mistakes that can't be resolved. Some of this comes from an ala prima mindset: a painting must come about through a series of deft brushstrokes so thoroughly schooled that the finished work is evidence of a flawless performance. But some of the attitude is based on a misunderstanding of mentoring.
I think a better way to look at a student's work is to respond to it as a viewer, and teach how it is working and not yet working with the expectation that the student will find ways to edit the work to expand on successes and resolve difficulties. My attitude is simply that a problematic work is not yet complete and that the student requires a fresh set of eyes to identify the discords. But only the artist can resolve those discords, and only through working on the piece. Very often, no one—teacher or student—can predict the method of resolution; it comes only through reworking.
Rather than negating the student's work as broken, then, my method is to reinforce the work as transitional. Either the work will lead to a better finished version or it will lead to a better next painting. Instead of saying, you didn't do thus and so it is flawed the teacher should say the painting is doing thus and that's not working. Instead of saying you should do thus to fix it, the teacher should say play with it to see what might resolve the problem; maybe the painting will suggest something to you as you work on it.The difference between these two attitudes is striking. In the first, the teacher is the authority and the student is lacking. In the second, the painting is lacking, but the painting itself is respected as the final authority and the student, not the teacher, is empowered to bring the art to life by listening to the painting, not by adhering to the teacher's commands.
My method of teaching comes from a particular standpoint that contrasts with the traditional top-down attitude of superiority that is common to institutional education. Instead of treating the student as a novice lacking knowledge that I possess, I treat the student as a natural in transition while I see myself as an experienced mentor.
All good artists are life-long students, struggling to make their art come alive. I understand the student because I am a student. I understand the student's art because I understand art. But no one knows the student's motivation and direction better than the student. It is true that the student cannot see the work as fresh as my eyes can. Instead of being prescriptive in my feedback, however, I am descriptive: I share with the student what works and what doesn't work to my mind and eyes. I don't presume to know how to proceed—I can only make some general and very open-ended suggestions that are based on a very rigorous knowledge of the fundamentals and principles of art and design.
For this reason, it is extremely important that the student is given the opportunity to finish the art before presenting it for feedback. Very likely the work will be in a draft stage, but it will be in a finished first or second or third state. It is not fair to ambush a student's unfinished work with prescriptive advice or admonishments of incompetence. This is not about self-esteem, it's about fairness. As a teacher, I can have no idea what a student is trying to accomplish until the work is completely presented. Then what is resolved and not resolved are clear. At this point, I can respond as a viewer to the work and offer feedback about what's working or not working, given a more solid understanding of the intent of the artist.
Friday, April 4, 2014
Time + Money + Resources, Part III
—The art world—
Sometime last year, I introduced the idea of an equation for success in an art career. I said that a successful art career is equal to time plus money plus resources. It's a simplistic formula, intended to illustrate the struggle we all engage in just to get to the point of a healthy art practice. It's basically an economics and ecology sort of equation, leaving out all the other elements of creativity.
But I pointed out that it's a recursive formula, feeding back into itself. When life is costing us time and money and resources, we spend each asset on the other, moving away from financial success. When we have an excess of any of them, it tends to enable us to increase all of them. We either spend time, money, and resources and lose, or we gain each of them.
Art is a luxury. Even for the artist. Art can only happen after the cost of living is paid. Below the bottom line, the equation moves backwards into negative numbers. Above the bottom line, the equation moves forward. It literally either starves or gets fat.
Along the lines of this Dickens quote, and sticking with our analogy, if we indicate the bottom line by using a zero as a starting point, we can plug imaginary numbers into the time + money + resources equation. In order for a successful career in art to happen, more of the assets in my equation have to be a more positive number (i.e., in excess of merely living). If more of the assets are more negative (not getting by), then the art career doesn't happen and the equation moves backward, further away from a successful career.
Let's complicate things. Let's expand the equation and say that each asset is either gained from or spent on the other two. We now test the limits of analogy and get ridiculously specific, but it helps to illustrate my point.
Let's take the last of the parenthetical calculations, which states time + money equals resources. Remember, each of these assets can be gained or spent. If I gain positive 1 money but spent negative 1 time to get it, everything remains the same, the money is just enough for subsistence. I've no time or money left for developing my art practice. My resources do not grow. I'm tired and need time for rest. But if I get twice the money out of my time, I'll generate new resources that can buy me more time through efficiency and productivity, thus earning me additional dollars. I suppose it's basic economic theory, though I never learned it this way in college or high school.
But, we are still speaking abstractly. Coming back to the real world (with a little more insight), I've found that it helps me to place a monetary value on my time. I can value it, for example, at $25 an hour. It also helps to value my resources. How much time and money do I spend on them? How much do I use up?
For example, when I first started going to an artist meetup almost an hour away from my studio, I calculated the gasoline and wear and tear on my van at 55 cents mile, and I calculated the time I spent at $25 an hour. Then there's the money for tolls, coffee, and a bowl of soup if I was hungry. I learned that I was spending in excess of a hundred dollars hanging out and decided that, for a time, it was worth it. Nonetheless, I only lasted a few months before my van had to be junked. I know that it cost me some months of owning my van. I can evaluate that, and I do not feel upset about the van breaking down because I understood what the costs were.
I realize that I'm geeking out on this topic. But the reality is, I need to be clearer about the economics of art making so that I'm not always so confused and angry about how hard it is just to get to make art.
Sometime last year, I introduced the idea of an equation for success in an art career. I said that a successful art career is equal to time plus money plus resources. It's a simplistic formula, intended to illustrate the struggle we all engage in just to get to the point of a healthy art practice. It's basically an economics and ecology sort of equation, leaving out all the other elements of creativity.
But I pointed out that it's a recursive formula, feeding back into itself. When life is costing us time and money and resources, we spend each asset on the other, moving away from financial success. When we have an excess of any of them, it tends to enable us to increase all of them. We either spend time, money, and resources and lose, or we gain each of them.
Art is a luxury. Even for the artist. Art can only happen after the cost of living is paid. Below the bottom line, the equation moves backwards into negative numbers. Above the bottom line, the equation moves forward. It literally either starves or gets fat.
"Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery. The blossom is blighted, the leaf is withered, the god of day goes down upon the dreary scene, and, in short, you are for ever floored."
Along the lines of this Dickens quote, and sticking with our analogy, if we indicate the bottom line by using a zero as a starting point, we can plug imaginary numbers into the time + money + resources equation. In order for a successful career in art to happen, more of the assets in my equation have to be a more positive number (i.e., in excess of merely living). If more of the assets are more negative (not getting by), then the art career doesn't happen and the equation moves backward, further away from a successful career.
Let's complicate things. Let's expand the equation and say that each asset is either gained from or spent on the other two. We now test the limits of analogy and get ridiculously specific, but it helps to illustrate my point.
Time as (moneyA + resourcesA)
plus
Money as (resourcesB + timeA)
plus
Resources as (timeB + moneyB)
plus
Money as (resourcesB + timeA)
plus
Resources as (timeB + moneyB)
Let's take the last of the parenthetical calculations, which states time + money equals resources. Remember, each of these assets can be gained or spent. If I gain positive 1 money but spent negative 1 time to get it, everything remains the same, the money is just enough for subsistence. I've no time or money left for developing my art practice. My resources do not grow. I'm tired and need time for rest. But if I get twice the money out of my time, I'll generate new resources that can buy me more time through efficiency and productivity, thus earning me additional dollars. I suppose it's basic economic theory, though I never learned it this way in college or high school.
But, we are still speaking abstractly. Coming back to the real world (with a little more insight), I've found that it helps me to place a monetary value on my time. I can value it, for example, at $25 an hour. It also helps to value my resources. How much time and money do I spend on them? How much do I use up?
For example, when I first started going to an artist meetup almost an hour away from my studio, I calculated the gasoline and wear and tear on my van at 55 cents mile, and I calculated the time I spent at $25 an hour. Then there's the money for tolls, coffee, and a bowl of soup if I was hungry. I learned that I was spending in excess of a hundred dollars hanging out and decided that, for a time, it was worth it. Nonetheless, I only lasted a few months before my van had to be junked. I know that it cost me some months of owning my van. I can evaluate that, and I do not feel upset about the van breaking down because I understood what the costs were.
I realize that I'm geeking out on this topic. But the reality is, I need to be clearer about the economics of art making so that I'm not always so confused and angry about how hard it is just to get to make art.
Saturday, March 22, 2014
Art or artist?
—The art world—
This morning, I was reading something Vasari wrote about Lorenzo de' Medici's patronage of the arts. Lorenzo asked a master painter to send him young apprentices who had promise in sculpture. The patron housed the young men, gave them food, and provided them with training from a master sculptor there in the de' Medici household. As the young artists developed, he supported them with a salary.
Here in 2014, our situation as artists is very different. It's a miracle to find the rare grade school that offers any child the opportunity to show some budding promise in art prior to college. Some high school art students do receive scholarships on the merit of their potential, but most pay their own way through college in order to learn art. Of course, these days, the majority of what a young art student pays for art school comes from taxpayers, in the form of student loans, and few art students will ever be able to earn enough to repay four years of schooling at $25,000 a year in tuition. This seems like the ultimate public support for art. In reality, though, instead of feeling supported, young artists begin their careers feeling impossibly burdened with debt. For a studio major, college rarely leads to any immediate opportunity.
When artists graduate, far from receiving a salary, they continue to pay out of their own pockets for the right to be artists. For example, artists are expected to pay entrance fees to compete for acceptance into shows. This can be quite a burden over time; some artists spend thousands a year just on entrance fees while collecting mostly rejection letters instead of invoices. Many art administrators have little reason to consider the livelihood of these artists; the end objective of a group show is the art, not the artist. Though the host organizations would like to take some commission from sales, group art shows often lead to few if any sales since few organizers of group art shows have strong relationships with collectors, and rarely are art shows promoted as a display of product for purchase. More often, the art functions as pieces of a thematic collection that enriches the public, enhances the community, and increases the host organization's (and the curator's) prestige. This is a tough deal for an artist. Mixed in with other artists, one has the opportunity to shine, to stand out, to become familiar to the art world over time. Or one simply becomes another bright note in the droning of the crowd.
Looking back at Vasari's account we see a big difference between patronage in the past and financial support for artists today. I'm no expert on how things were in the past, but I get the sense that artists today are expected to humbly provide art for our communities, to raise the status of our cities, to encourage unrelated commerce, and to entertain our children. Artists are expected to add novelty to our landscape, to add pageantry to our ideology, and to provide party favors for our bacchanal. In contrast to our reverence for actors and professional athletes, few people care about the well being of visual artists. Instead, we artists are expected to be grateful that we are allowed to make art. We artists are supposed to be willing volunteers. In an age when making art is considered a pastime, making a lot of it and making it well is viewed as a dream come true not a calling. Art-making is largely recognized as consumption and play rather than business. Ironically, as self-interest and accumulation of wealth by artists is increasingly frowned upon, collectors and administrators become increasingly indulgent and, paradoxically, the content of art itself becomes increasingly self-indulgent (which reinforces the capitalist ideology of the art-administration/collector complex).
So here we are left, in a competitive and self-interested world where we fend for ourselves as artists, disconnected from each other (in contrast to the united art movements of the past) and left under-compensated while the rich toy with our visions on the secondary market. If we are lucky, after we receive success, then we will be given a grant in recognition of our achievements. But we have to come up with the money ourselves, first. We have to figure out how to make a living as an artist before we will be rewarded with commissions and grants.
I read once that Leo Castelli advanced his artists money prior to sales to support them in their artmaking. I read recently, too, of a European model in which artists receive a salary to produce art, and the dealer keeps the art made during that period. These are forms of support that value the artist, and understand that the artist comes first and the art will come second. These models, like Lorenzo's model of patronage, understand the potential for great art in an artist, and understand that a good way to get that art made is to support the artist.
I recently stumbled upon a Web site for some sort of foundation for artists—I honestly don't recall the name. On their About page, however, they talked very passionately about how artists do not get the support they need and that they can't make great art because they have little financial resources to get started. The site lamented the fact that artists have no leg up when beginning their careers because they are not valued. The site sought to create value for artists so that they might get this support in the future.
But after searching all over the site, and finally finding my way around it with some help from Google, I found that the foundation offers no direct aid for the struggling artist who is looking for help. Like Lorenzo, the foundation asks master artists to send creators of talent their way, in order that the foundation can give them financial support. But the foundation makes it clear that they are only interested in hearing about established artists who make a significant living off their work. In other words, this foundation only wants to reward artists who are already supported. Apparently, their method of creating value for the artist in general is to support and promote particular artists who are already successful. This is meant to educate the public on art, I suppose, with the conceit that the established artists are making the best art.
Obviously, I think there is a problem with this model: it doesn't support young people who show a proclivity for and a leaning toward art. And those may be the actual artists, rather than the folks who function well in a competitive economy, or the folks who relate better to contemporary theory.
Castelli and Lorenzo had something in common. They started with a recognition of talent and then they fostered that talent. Historically, there are lots of ways artists can receive support. Today, support for art comes primarily from art administrators. But how are these administrators fostering artists? Unfortunately, the artists most likely to succeed in a world controlled by art administrators are the artists who are most like art administrators. Lorenzo was a patron. And patrons are not art administrators—they are, ideally, collaborators of a different kind.
Today's administrators of contemporary, collectable art love artists, too. They like to work with, and hobnob with, and rub elbows with artists because such art promoters often think of themselves as artists. Indeed, often they are trained as artists and their creativity translates into their work as organizers. They create great displays of the machinery they operate but sometimes end up squandering the display space inside in the process. For some of the more offbeat curators, what they do place inside is more about art than art. For many art world wheelers, dealers, or collectors, art is the trappings of their lifestyle: signifiers of anything from freedom, to progressive ideals, to opulence. And it is far more likely that they will support artists who support their lavish enterprises and self-absorbed displays than they will support young people with a more genuine creative promise.
I have noticed that both my wealthy colleagues as well as those learned in academic theory seem able to walk into any strange enterprise and receive some opportunities—however lean. Somehow, they are able to show papers that display their success, and they can get a lucrative or almost lucrative position for continued success. I imagine this as the established taking care of each other, perhaps quite unconsciously. But what gave my established friends the original leg up? Was it patronage for their innate vocation, for their calling, their voice? It does not appear to work this way. The struggling artist can spend a lifetime trying to get started, all the time paying dues and rent to an art world that pays them little or nothing in advance or return.
No, I fear that the opposite is true. Instead of the powerful recognizing the little voice in the budding apprentice and empowering it, the apprentice recognizes the powerful language of the established, and adopts that.
Lorenzo must have loved art. I know nothing about him beyond the little anecdote I read. But it appears that he knew where art comes from.
This morning, I was reading something Vasari wrote about Lorenzo de' Medici's patronage of the arts. Lorenzo asked a master painter to send him young apprentices who had promise in sculpture. The patron housed the young men, gave them food, and provided them with training from a master sculptor there in the de' Medici household. As the young artists developed, he supported them with a salary.
Here in 2014, our situation as artists is very different. It's a miracle to find the rare grade school that offers any child the opportunity to show some budding promise in art prior to college. Some high school art students do receive scholarships on the merit of their potential, but most pay their own way through college in order to learn art. Of course, these days, the majority of what a young art student pays for art school comes from taxpayers, in the form of student loans, and few art students will ever be able to earn enough to repay four years of schooling at $25,000 a year in tuition. This seems like the ultimate public support for art. In reality, though, instead of feeling supported, young artists begin their careers feeling impossibly burdened with debt. For a studio major, college rarely leads to any immediate opportunity.
When artists graduate, far from receiving a salary, they continue to pay out of their own pockets for the right to be artists. For example, artists are expected to pay entrance fees to compete for acceptance into shows. This can be quite a burden over time; some artists spend thousands a year just on entrance fees while collecting mostly rejection letters instead of invoices. Many art administrators have little reason to consider the livelihood of these artists; the end objective of a group show is the art, not the artist. Though the host organizations would like to take some commission from sales, group art shows often lead to few if any sales since few organizers of group art shows have strong relationships with collectors, and rarely are art shows promoted as a display of product for purchase. More often, the art functions as pieces of a thematic collection that enriches the public, enhances the community, and increases the host organization's (and the curator's) prestige. This is a tough deal for an artist. Mixed in with other artists, one has the opportunity to shine, to stand out, to become familiar to the art world over time. Or one simply becomes another bright note in the droning of the crowd.
Looking back at Vasari's account we see a big difference between patronage in the past and financial support for artists today. I'm no expert on how things were in the past, but I get the sense that artists today are expected to humbly provide art for our communities, to raise the status of our cities, to encourage unrelated commerce, and to entertain our children. Artists are expected to add novelty to our landscape, to add pageantry to our ideology, and to provide party favors for our bacchanal. In contrast to our reverence for actors and professional athletes, few people care about the well being of visual artists. Instead, we artists are expected to be grateful that we are allowed to make art. We artists are supposed to be willing volunteers. In an age when making art is considered a pastime, making a lot of it and making it well is viewed as a dream come true not a calling. Art-making is largely recognized as consumption and play rather than business. Ironically, as self-interest and accumulation of wealth by artists is increasingly frowned upon, collectors and administrators become increasingly indulgent and, paradoxically, the content of art itself becomes increasingly self-indulgent (which reinforces the capitalist ideology of the art-administration/collector complex).
So here we are left, in a competitive and self-interested world where we fend for ourselves as artists, disconnected from each other (in contrast to the united art movements of the past) and left under-compensated while the rich toy with our visions on the secondary market. If we are lucky, after we receive success, then we will be given a grant in recognition of our achievements. But we have to come up with the money ourselves, first. We have to figure out how to make a living as an artist before we will be rewarded with commissions and grants.
I read once that Leo Castelli advanced his artists money prior to sales to support them in their artmaking. I read recently, too, of a European model in which artists receive a salary to produce art, and the dealer keeps the art made during that period. These are forms of support that value the artist, and understand that the artist comes first and the art will come second. These models, like Lorenzo's model of patronage, understand the potential for great art in an artist, and understand that a good way to get that art made is to support the artist.
I recently stumbled upon a Web site for some sort of foundation for artists—I honestly don't recall the name. On their About page, however, they talked very passionately about how artists do not get the support they need and that they can't make great art because they have little financial resources to get started. The site lamented the fact that artists have no leg up when beginning their careers because they are not valued. The site sought to create value for artists so that they might get this support in the future.
But after searching all over the site, and finally finding my way around it with some help from Google, I found that the foundation offers no direct aid for the struggling artist who is looking for help. Like Lorenzo, the foundation asks master artists to send creators of talent their way, in order that the foundation can give them financial support. But the foundation makes it clear that they are only interested in hearing about established artists who make a significant living off their work. In other words, this foundation only wants to reward artists who are already supported. Apparently, their method of creating value for the artist in general is to support and promote particular artists who are already successful. This is meant to educate the public on art, I suppose, with the conceit that the established artists are making the best art.
Obviously, I think there is a problem with this model: it doesn't support young people who show a proclivity for and a leaning toward art. And those may be the actual artists, rather than the folks who function well in a competitive economy, or the folks who relate better to contemporary theory.
Castelli and Lorenzo had something in common. They started with a recognition of talent and then they fostered that talent. Historically, there are lots of ways artists can receive support. Today, support for art comes primarily from art administrators. But how are these administrators fostering artists? Unfortunately, the artists most likely to succeed in a world controlled by art administrators are the artists who are most like art administrators. Lorenzo was a patron. And patrons are not art administrators—they are, ideally, collaborators of a different kind.
Today's administrators of contemporary, collectable art love artists, too. They like to work with, and hobnob with, and rub elbows with artists because such art promoters often think of themselves as artists. Indeed, often they are trained as artists and their creativity translates into their work as organizers. They create great displays of the machinery they operate but sometimes end up squandering the display space inside in the process. For some of the more offbeat curators, what they do place inside is more about art than art. For many art world wheelers, dealers, or collectors, art is the trappings of their lifestyle: signifiers of anything from freedom, to progressive ideals, to opulence. And it is far more likely that they will support artists who support their lavish enterprises and self-absorbed displays than they will support young people with a more genuine creative promise.
I have noticed that both my wealthy colleagues as well as those learned in academic theory seem able to walk into any strange enterprise and receive some opportunities—however lean. Somehow, they are able to show papers that display their success, and they can get a lucrative or almost lucrative position for continued success. I imagine this as the established taking care of each other, perhaps quite unconsciously. But what gave my established friends the original leg up? Was it patronage for their innate vocation, for their calling, their voice? It does not appear to work this way. The struggling artist can spend a lifetime trying to get started, all the time paying dues and rent to an art world that pays them little or nothing in advance or return.
No, I fear that the opposite is true. Instead of the powerful recognizing the little voice in the budding apprentice and empowering it, the apprentice recognizes the powerful language of the established, and adopts that.
Lorenzo must have loved art. I know nothing about him beyond the little anecdote I read. But it appears that he knew where art comes from.
Saturday, February 8, 2014
Where do I come from? What am I? Where am I going? And where is the good stuff?
—Creativity—
An artist told me yesterday that she's decided to forgo trying to please the art world. Another, a few days ago, told me he feels disconnected from the scene. Their feelings are not uncommon. These artists are the good ones. But the art world is a syndicate that rewards the self-interest of its members and some of us do not share the attitude that membership demands. So it's harder for us to share the spoils. Not all of the art world is this troublesome, but quite a lot of it is.
Earlier this week, I saw the 100th anniversary remounting of works from the famous 1913 Armory Show. I was intrigued by documents of responses to the original exhibition. A number of critics and artists back then pointed to work they felt was falling into extreme individualism—some of it very academic in its own way. And this feeling parallels my criticism of the current scene as too self-absorbed—more so than the critics in 1913 might have predicted. I can see, now, how things went in the twentieth century, when the authorship born of the Renaissance morphed into full-blown narcissism by the end of the millennium, leaving some of us who are more generous out of the equation.
Last year, I requested about fifteen books from the library. These books had one subject in common: they were all about the art world. After reading through these books, I realized that the art scene, as it largely exists, has little to do with me. I realized that my goals need to be focused more on making my art than getting my work into institutions. Somewhere in this mess, there may be a place for me, but I won't find it by seeking approval from the majority of art organizations or art administrators; they just aren't involved in art as I learned it and practice it. And I won't find a place for my work buying chances in the group show lottery. Not when art as I learned it and practice it rarely shows up in many of the shows.
Filling the Art World Void
This is how I am changing my perspective on the art world. But I have a feeling the art world is changing, too. If there is a void, as I have described, then sooner or later people will fill it. Sooner or later the decline will change directions, so I would do well to stay invested in this venture, and bet that the long arc of art history will hold value over the aberration of the last three decades or more. I have identified a half-dozen ways that we might anticipate people will fill this void.
For one thing, we are already seeing a renewed interest in art education. Art education is returning to K-12 schools with a new understanding of its importance, bolstered by science. Also, I expect we will see a renewed interest in the existing canon of artists who have stood the test of time. Fifteen-dollar museum shows will break records instead of One-hundred-and-fifteen-million-dollar painting sales. After all, very few people are getting anything out of the exploits at Christie's and Sotheby's. It doesn't make for good reality TV. Sooner or later, conspicuous affluence will become immoral, tasteless, or even dangerous. The auction bubble will have to burst.
We very well may see "discoveries" of artists from the past who are under-appreciated or unknown. I saw some great work at the show this week by an artist or two I had never heard of. Having culled the herd for several generations, we will break open the crates at the taxidermists. There will be some young artists doing great art, too. Growing up in the void, there will be only a small percentage whose creativity transcends contemporary culture, or lack of it. After the student-loan gravy train loses its wheels and The MFA pyramid-scheme collapses, these young people will have to find an alternative way to learn art. But if they can, they will stand out.
Here in America, we will once again turn to artists from other cultures and other lands (and many that are not European ones). We will find it worthwhile to learn to say their foreign names and accept that they don't look like American beatniks. And those Americans who have struggled for decades without giving up will finally get their audience, and their audience will finally receive their gifts. Already, we are seeing a major shift away from that brand of self-indulgent symbolism and expressionism that bears no resemblance to the earlier art of those designations. Figurative work, much of it very abstract and interesting, is enjoying a new reception. This is good news for many artists.
Like recovering from a thirty-year drug and alcohol stupor, returning to artistic normalcy comes at the cost of collective cultural brain damage. It may take generations to get healthy with art again. But I pray we are on the way. We will have to teach ourselves. Or, we will have to heroically seek out the teachers whose voices we've silenced for decades and beg forgiveness. I pray we find the neural pathways to process their words.
Critics Go Back to Work
I've seen so much fear and foolishness around art in my adulthood. Something has to give. Lately, it seems that critics are coming to their senses. Maybe, now, artists won't be so quick to circle their wagons to defend anything and everything that gets called art. One fine Art Friday, the New York Times may declare that we all know better, even though, maybe, the visionaries among us knew better on Thursday, being ahead of our time.
Part of this "coming to our senses" is just a general mellowing that occurs anywhere. Give people time and they will stop reacting fearfully and will be logical about things—at least those things that sit in the past. A number of years ago, I saw someone write, with the clarity of hindsight, about how a controversial sculpture might actually have been placed badly after all and maybe the public wasn't simply illiterate when they protested it's location. This admission has no bearing at all on the undeniable quality or importance of the artist's art, of course, which should have been obvious: it was the site, not the sculpture that was the problem.
But I suspect there is another source for this sudden shift away from blind allegiance among all American artists, cultural managers, and art administrators. I think that the Young British Artists tried to do what American artists always get away with and they got called on it by the British critics. I think that the British still hold all creativity up to Shakespeare and they won't tolerate very much frivolity or cynicism. Following their lead, I think the American critics have given themselves permission to actually be critical—probably for fear of letting the Brits beat them to the punch and embarrass them.
Yet Some Remain Oblivious
Last year, I walked past a poster on a bus stop for a famous postmodernist's new show and I couldn't help but feel that the excitement it would have stirred decades ago is now waning. It has to. That's probably why he is mounting a number of offensives to promote the work and legitimize it. The truth is, I think, none are more modern than those who call themselves post-modern. They are the tail end of a long era.
Postmodern art of the American contemporary flavor has been around long enough that we've had time for some hindsight. Critics say that only time will tell who is a great artist. Art critics like to refer to this as "the test of time" but it has nothing to do with standing the test of time in any mystical sense--it's just the limits of patience. Saying time will tell would be a cop out if it weren't the case that most critics (and many of the rest of us) really can't tell the cream-of-the-crop from the chaff, now or in the future.
The result of this time-will-tell mentality is the very real belief among critics that no one can predict success. But I think this is either an admission that success in our culture has nothing to do with talent and quality, or an unwitting admission that most critics just aren't the ones who can tell what's good or bad. It's not really what motivates them. If these critics, like so many collectors, fans, and artists themselves, were invested in creativity rather than ideology (or power, prestige, excess—name a vice), this wouldn't be the case. At any rate, critics subconsciously know they are off the hook for what they say today if the truth doesn't come out until tomorrow, buried in the Times, for those of us who didn't see a benefit in knowing it earlier.
The organizers of the 1913 Armory Show felt that art progressed through history and they crafted a narrative of advancement from Ingres to Duchamp. Picasso knew better. Whatever people come up with to make fashionable, the good stuff runs through all of our ups and downs over time, and the good stuff does not need to speak through manifestos. The good stuff shares qualities that most people can't put into words. Always, artists are making the good stuff. But not always do the good artists make it in the art market. In the best of worlds, they can make it somewhere, at some point, during their lives, rewarding them for being the good ones.
An artist told me yesterday that she's decided to forgo trying to please the art world. Another, a few days ago, told me he feels disconnected from the scene. Their feelings are not uncommon. These artists are the good ones. But the art world is a syndicate that rewards the self-interest of its members and some of us do not share the attitude that membership demands. So it's harder for us to share the spoils. Not all of the art world is this troublesome, but quite a lot of it is.
Earlier this week, I saw the 100th anniversary remounting of works from the famous 1913 Armory Show. I was intrigued by documents of responses to the original exhibition. A number of critics and artists back then pointed to work they felt was falling into extreme individualism—some of it very academic in its own way. And this feeling parallels my criticism of the current scene as too self-absorbed—more so than the critics in 1913 might have predicted. I can see, now, how things went in the twentieth century, when the authorship born of the Renaissance morphed into full-blown narcissism by the end of the millennium, leaving some of us who are more generous out of the equation.
Last year, I requested about fifteen books from the library. These books had one subject in common: they were all about the art world. After reading through these books, I realized that the art scene, as it largely exists, has little to do with me. I realized that my goals need to be focused more on making my art than getting my work into institutions. Somewhere in this mess, there may be a place for me, but I won't find it by seeking approval from the majority of art organizations or art administrators; they just aren't involved in art as I learned it and practice it. And I won't find a place for my work buying chances in the group show lottery. Not when art as I learned it and practice it rarely shows up in many of the shows.
Filling the Art World Void
This is how I am changing my perspective on the art world. But I have a feeling the art world is changing, too. If there is a void, as I have described, then sooner or later people will fill it. Sooner or later the decline will change directions, so I would do well to stay invested in this venture, and bet that the long arc of art history will hold value over the aberration of the last three decades or more. I have identified a half-dozen ways that we might anticipate people will fill this void.
For one thing, we are already seeing a renewed interest in art education. Art education is returning to K-12 schools with a new understanding of its importance, bolstered by science. Also, I expect we will see a renewed interest in the existing canon of artists who have stood the test of time. Fifteen-dollar museum shows will break records instead of One-hundred-and-fifteen-million-dollar painting sales. After all, very few people are getting anything out of the exploits at Christie's and Sotheby's. It doesn't make for good reality TV. Sooner or later, conspicuous affluence will become immoral, tasteless, or even dangerous. The auction bubble will have to burst.
We very well may see "discoveries" of artists from the past who are under-appreciated or unknown. I saw some great work at the show this week by an artist or two I had never heard of. Having culled the herd for several generations, we will break open the crates at the taxidermists. There will be some young artists doing great art, too. Growing up in the void, there will be only a small percentage whose creativity transcends contemporary culture, or lack of it. After the student-loan gravy train loses its wheels and The MFA pyramid-scheme collapses, these young people will have to find an alternative way to learn art. But if they can, they will stand out.
Here in America, we will once again turn to artists from other cultures and other lands (and many that are not European ones). We will find it worthwhile to learn to say their foreign names and accept that they don't look like American beatniks. And those Americans who have struggled for decades without giving up will finally get their audience, and their audience will finally receive their gifts. Already, we are seeing a major shift away from that brand of self-indulgent symbolism and expressionism that bears no resemblance to the earlier art of those designations. Figurative work, much of it very abstract and interesting, is enjoying a new reception. This is good news for many artists.
"Weariness comes at the end of the acts of a mechanical life, but at the same time it inaugurates the impulse of consciousness. It awakens consciousness and provokes what follows. What follows is the gradual return into the chain or it is the definitive awakening. At the end of the awakening comes, in time, the consequence: suicide or recovery."—Albert Camus
Like recovering from a thirty-year drug and alcohol stupor, returning to artistic normalcy comes at the cost of collective cultural brain damage. It may take generations to get healthy with art again. But I pray we are on the way. We will have to teach ourselves. Or, we will have to heroically seek out the teachers whose voices we've silenced for decades and beg forgiveness. I pray we find the neural pathways to process their words.
Critics Go Back to Work
I've seen so much fear and foolishness around art in my adulthood. Something has to give. Lately, it seems that critics are coming to their senses. Maybe, now, artists won't be so quick to circle their wagons to defend anything and everything that gets called art. One fine Art Friday, the New York Times may declare that we all know better, even though, maybe, the visionaries among us knew better on Thursday, being ahead of our time.
Part of this "coming to our senses" is just a general mellowing that occurs anywhere. Give people time and they will stop reacting fearfully and will be logical about things—at least those things that sit in the past. A number of years ago, I saw someone write, with the clarity of hindsight, about how a controversial sculpture might actually have been placed badly after all and maybe the public wasn't simply illiterate when they protested it's location. This admission has no bearing at all on the undeniable quality or importance of the artist's art, of course, which should have been obvious: it was the site, not the sculpture that was the problem.
But I suspect there is another source for this sudden shift away from blind allegiance among all American artists, cultural managers, and art administrators. I think that the Young British Artists tried to do what American artists always get away with and they got called on it by the British critics. I think that the British still hold all creativity up to Shakespeare and they won't tolerate very much frivolity or cynicism. Following their lead, I think the American critics have given themselves permission to actually be critical—probably for fear of letting the Brits beat them to the punch and embarrass them.
Yet Some Remain Oblivious
Last year, I walked past a poster on a bus stop for a famous postmodernist's new show and I couldn't help but feel that the excitement it would have stirred decades ago is now waning. It has to. That's probably why he is mounting a number of offensives to promote the work and legitimize it. The truth is, I think, none are more modern than those who call themselves post-modern. They are the tail end of a long era.
Postmodern art of the American contemporary flavor has been around long enough that we've had time for some hindsight. Critics say that only time will tell who is a great artist. Art critics like to refer to this as "the test of time" but it has nothing to do with standing the test of time in any mystical sense--it's just the limits of patience. Saying time will tell would be a cop out if it weren't the case that most critics (and many of the rest of us) really can't tell the cream-of-the-crop from the chaff, now or in the future.
The result of this time-will-tell mentality is the very real belief among critics that no one can predict success. But I think this is either an admission that success in our culture has nothing to do with talent and quality, or an unwitting admission that most critics just aren't the ones who can tell what's good or bad. It's not really what motivates them. If these critics, like so many collectors, fans, and artists themselves, were invested in creativity rather than ideology (or power, prestige, excess—name a vice), this wouldn't be the case. At any rate, critics subconsciously know they are off the hook for what they say today if the truth doesn't come out until tomorrow, buried in the Times, for those of us who didn't see a benefit in knowing it earlier.
The organizers of the 1913 Armory Show felt that art progressed through history and they crafted a narrative of advancement from Ingres to Duchamp. Picasso knew better. Whatever people come up with to make fashionable, the good stuff runs through all of our ups and downs over time, and the good stuff does not need to speak through manifestos. The good stuff shares qualities that most people can't put into words. Always, artists are making the good stuff. But not always do the good artists make it in the art market. In the best of worlds, they can make it somewhere, at some point, during their lives, rewarding them for being the good ones.
Friday, January 31, 2014
Thinking about the sun when lighting the model
When lighting the model with a spotlight, I often think in terms of the sun, even though I am indoors. We begin with a single lamp on a stand. Ideally, the room will be filled with some ambient or diffused light and the spotlight will provide highlights and shadows. This is similar to the way that the sun provides a direct light source while the atmosphere and environment scatters light to fill the shadows of the figure with detail. If you can, find a way to bounce reflected light from a wall opposite the lamp or place the model between the lamp and the soft light of a northern window covered with a sheer curtain to get this same effect.
I think about the sun when lighting the model because I know that everything we do in a painting inevitably references our natural environment. Even if we spend more and more time indoors under artificial lighting, the experience of the sun is a very powerful influence on our understanding of a figurative painting. We prefer our pictures to conform to our experience. Like sunlight, indoor lighting is very often above the figure, and when it is not, it looks strange. Even if the artist provides a context for artificial light below the figure—stage lighting at a theatre, for example—we still see a strangeness in it.
So let's think about where the sun is in the sky. When lighting the model, a good place to start is by positioning the lamp at a combination of 45° angles, halfway between the floor and ceiling and halfway between the fronts and sides of the model. This angle feels very comfortable because it relates to our experience of sunlight.
The sun casts light from two directions. Throughout the day in the Northern hemisphere, no matter what time it is, the sun casts light from the south toward the north. This is because the sun is not directly above us, especially in the winter. When we are facing south, the sun is before us. Facing north, it is a little behind us. But the sun also moves from east to west and this positions the sun from another orientation. So, while the sun shines from south to north, morning light is cast from East to West, and the opposite is true in the evening. This is why, when people say, "just look at the sun and you can figure out what direction you are facing," it's not always so simple.
45 degrees is a good reference for two reasons. First, southern sunlight hits the northern hemisphere of Earth at an angle of 45° in the summer at noon when it is 90° above the Earth. Solar panels and south facing hills in vineyards are angled at 45° to collect sunlight. Now that it is winter, this angle has changed to around 36° at noon, but 45° is a good standard.
Secondly, in the morning and afternoon, the sun is hitting the Earth from another 45 degree orientation. When the sun moves from the East to the West, it casts light at a variety of angles to the East and West. A common angle of lighting for landscapes and architecture is the 45 degree cast shadow. This occurs in the morning after sunrise and in the evening before sundown, with the actual time depending on seasons, and this light produces warm light and cool shadows. Architecture photographers utilize this natural light when photographing the exterior of buildings. Midday light, around noon, tends to flatten out form because it doesn't give us longer, cooler shadows.
The clock face originates in the Northern European sundial, with noon right at the top. A simple way to envision the angles of light above the Earth is to think of squeezing the 12 hours of the clock into a semi-circle, like a sundial, instead of a full clock face, considering sunrise to be 6 a.m. and sunset to be 6 p.m. This is a rough approximation, but it will suffice. My sundial runs counterclockwise to put west on the left side. If this "sundial" were raised up perpendicular to the ground plane, you can see that positioning the lamp at 45° angles gives us 9 a.m. and 3 p.m.
In nature, the angle of the sun has a bearing on color temperature and so color temperature is one of the most important ways to render form in a painting. In the studio setting, the spotlight is always going to be about the same color no matter how you position it, so we have to carefully choose the color of our light and the color of architecture and clothing that reflects the spotlight. Sunlight, however, changes colors throughout the day giving us a range of warms and cools within the subject. Sunlight travels through more of the atmosphere when it is low on the horizon, scattering the blue light and streaming the red light. Except at dawn and dusk, you can look directly at the distant horizon and see all this blue light greying and bluing out the distant topography.
I think of it like a cross-section of PVC pipe. When I'm cutting pipe, it's harder at first, and then when I get halfway through it gets really easy. But then it gets hard again. This is because, like the sun in the atmosphere, I'm going through a lot more material when cutting across rather than through the plastic. At midday, the light will appear cool and the shadows will become warm. At noon, the sun travels through the thinnest space of atmosphere. At midday, therefore, the blue light cuts right through the atmosphere and the lighting will appear cool and the shadows will become relatively warmer, as a result.
You can get spotlights with different color temperatures, and depending upon what you use to bounce the light, you can play with warms and cools in the highlights, shadows, and reflected lights. You can get some interesting effects using multiple light sources, as well. However you choose to light the model, though, sunlight will always set the standard for what we find natural.
I think about the sun when lighting the model because I know that everything we do in a painting inevitably references our natural environment. Even if we spend more and more time indoors under artificial lighting, the experience of the sun is a very powerful influence on our understanding of a figurative painting. We prefer our pictures to conform to our experience. Like sunlight, indoor lighting is very often above the figure, and when it is not, it looks strange. Even if the artist provides a context for artificial light below the figure—stage lighting at a theatre, for example—we still see a strangeness in it.
So let's think about where the sun is in the sky. When lighting the model, a good place to start is by positioning the lamp at a combination of 45° angles, halfway between the floor and ceiling and halfway between the fronts and sides of the model. This angle feels very comfortable because it relates to our experience of sunlight.
The sun casts light from two directions. Throughout the day in the Northern hemisphere, no matter what time it is, the sun casts light from the south toward the north. This is because the sun is not directly above us, especially in the winter. When we are facing south, the sun is before us. Facing north, it is a little behind us. But the sun also moves from east to west and this positions the sun from another orientation. So, while the sun shines from south to north, morning light is cast from East to West, and the opposite is true in the evening. This is why, when people say, "just look at the sun and you can figure out what direction you are facing," it's not always so simple.
 |
| 45 Degrees |
45 degrees is a good reference for two reasons. First, southern sunlight hits the northern hemisphere of Earth at an angle of 45° in the summer at noon when it is 90° above the Earth. Solar panels and south facing hills in vineyards are angled at 45° to collect sunlight. Now that it is winter, this angle has changed to around 36° at noon, but 45° is a good standard.
Secondly, in the morning and afternoon, the sun is hitting the Earth from another 45 degree orientation. When the sun moves from the East to the West, it casts light at a variety of angles to the East and West. A common angle of lighting for landscapes and architecture is the 45 degree cast shadow. This occurs in the morning after sunrise and in the evening before sundown, with the actual time depending on seasons, and this light produces warm light and cool shadows. Architecture photographers utilize this natural light when photographing the exterior of buildings. Midday light, around noon, tends to flatten out form because it doesn't give us longer, cooler shadows.
The clock face originates in the Northern European sundial, with noon right at the top. A simple way to envision the angles of light above the Earth is to think of squeezing the 12 hours of the clock into a semi-circle, like a sundial, instead of a full clock face, considering sunrise to be 6 a.m. and sunset to be 6 p.m. This is a rough approximation, but it will suffice. My sundial runs counterclockwise to put west on the left side. If this "sundial" were raised up perpendicular to the ground plane, you can see that positioning the lamp at 45° angles gives us 9 a.m. and 3 p.m.
 |
| Position of the sun above the Earth throughout the day |
In nature, the angle of the sun has a bearing on color temperature and so color temperature is one of the most important ways to render form in a painting. In the studio setting, the spotlight is always going to be about the same color no matter how you position it, so we have to carefully choose the color of our light and the color of architecture and clothing that reflects the spotlight. Sunlight, however, changes colors throughout the day giving us a range of warms and cools within the subject. Sunlight travels through more of the atmosphere when it is low on the horizon, scattering the blue light and streaming the red light. Except at dawn and dusk, you can look directly at the distant horizon and see all this blue light greying and bluing out the distant topography.
 |
| At 6 p.m., sunlight travels through more atmosphere |
I think of it like a cross-section of PVC pipe. When I'm cutting pipe, it's harder at first, and then when I get halfway through it gets really easy. But then it gets hard again. This is because, like the sun in the atmosphere, I'm going through a lot more material when cutting across rather than through the plastic. At midday, the light will appear cool and the shadows will become warm. At noon, the sun travels through the thinnest space of atmosphere. At midday, therefore, the blue light cuts right through the atmosphere and the lighting will appear cool and the shadows will become relatively warmer, as a result.
You can get spotlights with different color temperatures, and depending upon what you use to bounce the light, you can play with warms and cools in the highlights, shadows, and reflected lights. You can get some interesting effects using multiple light sources, as well. However you choose to light the model, though, sunlight will always set the standard for what we find natural.
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