What is empathy?

—Design—

What is Empathy?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Forms of empathy

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

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

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

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

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

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

Empathy is about others

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

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

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

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

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

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

Empathy is about ourselves

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

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

So-called procrastination

—Creativity—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Procrastination.  Pro-crastinus.  To tomorrow.

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

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

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

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

Online learning outside the accredited university

—Another art—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is down-and-dirty day job stuff.

Will it work? Well, let's see.

Looking Back

—Creativity—

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

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

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

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

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

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

How far back can we find artist statements?

—The art world—

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

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

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

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

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

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

Art and the Internet

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

Backing up

—Tip—

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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)

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.

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.

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.

"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.

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

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.

The Marc Clemens adventures: The secret of the cement floor

Note from the editors. In this post, Mr. Jacobs introduces a new fiction feature that he will publish periodically narrating the imaginary adventures of one Marc Clemens, an emerging visual artist. Written as a blog within his own blog, Mr. Jacobs promises to entertain us with mystery and humor.

Tuesday, March 26, 2013

Sunday Afternoon at Pepper Mills Lake

Sunday, I was at Pepper Mills Lake with my easel and paints, trying to make an ironic painting. Which never really works, for some reason. But I was trying anyway.

I just think it's funny to see these self-important people with their designer jogging gettups walking their designer dogs, leash in one hand and a bag of poop in the other. It's so fashionable. Makes me think of the woman with the monkey in Seurat's Sunday Afternoon at La Grande Jatte.

One person after another came up to look at the painting and ooh and ahh over the dog in the picture.

"Oh look, Susan, it's a Shih Tzu. It looks just like Teresa's Princess."

"You're right, it has the same markings and the same bow. But that's not Teresa!"

"No, that's not Teresa. Who is she?" wondered the first woman.

I explained, "I just make people up."

"I don't recognize her," Susan said.

And one after another in the same way. None was aware that I was making fun of them with the pretentious woman, the pretentious dog.

On deconstruction

—Creativity—

I've been thinking about this word, deconstruct, because it's coming up in reference to my current paintings. In my art, I divide the human figure into shapes of color and value in a way that artists often have in mosaic, stained glass, batik, collage, and quilting not to mention vorticism, futurism, constructivism, cubism, and orphism. It's nothing new, though I am trying to make it fresh.

And the word deconstruct comes up, sometimes, when people describe the work. Ah, deconstruct, the New York Times word of the year from somewhere in the 90s that will not go away. In the spirit of postmodernism, the word is, itself, a construct (we can call this irony heterological, I discovered). In the spirit of human nature, we forget that, or worse, fixate on it. So I thought that I would clarify my understanding of the term and how I use it.

The key, for me, lies in understanding what a construct is. In our work-obsessed culture, we often focus on the verb, "construct," which means to build. We think of building as "construction." In our scientific-method-based way of thinking, we also think of natural things as constructions of nature. Thus, in a positivist, reductionist way, we like the idea of deconstructing things to find out their inner workings. And in our tradition of dissidence, we like the idea of deconstructing things to dismantle them.

But we should remember that the action to construct can also mean to form a construct, which is a psychological or sociological concept or idea. Regardless of its basis in nature or the human-made world, a construct is conceptual and not physically real. In my paintings, the painted figure is not physically real, it is the idea of the human body. It is a sign or symbol that I divide into swatches of color, which some people take as deconstructing the figure.

Now, if we think like deconstruction workers, we might consider that I am pulling nails and unscrewing screws and taking the sacred, visual language of this figure apart, or we might even think of me as doing demolition. The problem is, when we focus on tearing something apart, at best we are reducing it to its smallest constituent parts to study its pieces and see how it works. At worst, we value destroying it. In these senses, when I am deconstructing the figure, either I am taking someone's sacred language, in the first case, and parsing it out, or I am, in the second, sabotaging it or freeing us from it. Neither is without value, but my way of thinking about deconstruction is different.

I think of deconstruction as revealing the construct. In the best sense of deconstruction, I think, we are asking people to hear their own words and see their own images. We are, in a sense, reconstructing.

The best example I can think of is the way Shakespeare changes the order of words so we hear them for the first time. He also places incongruous words together to give us new perspective on meaning. And he is a master of the pun—a nearly lost art form. He is not simply parsing the language. He is doing the same service as breaking our words into their etymological root parts. But he's using our words. He's reconstructing our language so that it is fresh again. He's putting meaning back into our language after it has become, in Mark Twain's words, petrified custom.

I try to do something similar with the language of the figure. It's called poetry, and there are different ways to do it. Warhol repeats a familiar physiognomy with variations until we see it as strange. It is no longer the sociological and psychological construct that it had been. Similarly, Duchamp, in his Nude Descending a Staircase, reveals the figure in its physical action, its place in space and time, its basic geometry and form, and its mechanics. Again, we see it, like a Cezanne apple, for the first time.

These artists shatter our preconceptions—our lazy, stagnant knowledge—and get to root meaning. They reveal the origin. They are not tearing the model apart for the sake of the pieces. After they do their magic, they leave the construction of the figure evident.

Jacques Derrida tried to replace the word deconstruction with the word desedimentation. But the first word had already gone the way of language and become part of the sediment of our social minds. You can see the word in use all through our collective chatter and we take it for granted that we all know and agree upon what we are talking about. I wonder, however, when I hear it used in reference to my work, how accurate it is. How accurate is our understanding of the process when we label it with a fifty-cent buzzword that, heterologically, is probably in sore need itself of being deconstructed?