Humans are great storytellers and people want to know what something is, where it came from, why it was made and by whom. That information is key to how people react to your work and how much they value it; people’s assessment of a thing is affected by what they know about it.
Structure is everything
Well-structured stories are “tidy, sturdy, and logical”. Real life needs a lot of editing to even vaguely resemble a well-structured story!
John Gardner has a story formula: “A character wants something, goes after it despite opposition (perhaps including his own doubts), and so arrives at a win, lose or draw” (pp99)
Every piece of work you produce has its own story – get the idea, do the work, succeed (or don’t).
Pitches follow a similar structure – where have you been, what do you want and why, what did you do to get it; where are you now?; where are you going, and how can your audience help you get there?
Speak directly, respect your audience, be brief, proof-read. Like any skill, story-telling gets better the more you do it.
Talk about yourself at parties
You should be able to explain your work to a five-year-old. Keep your audience in mind, but keep it simple, humble, true and brief. Two or three sentences should do it, and they should be as free of adjectives as possible (“aspiring”, “amazing”, even “critically-acclaimed” can go).
Even before you’re ready to share our work, you can share your appreciation for the work of others. Things you read, watch, listen and subscribe to, sites you visit, artists you admire and are inspired by – things that humanise you, can help connect you with other fans, and lead people to find things that inspire them. Share, get other people interested in your interests and maybe they’ll share their interests.
No guilty pleasures
Inspiration can come from anywhere, no matter how ridiculous or lowbrow. Wear your heart on your sleeve and love your inspiration unashamedly and authentically.
“Being a geek is all about being honest about what you enjoy and not being afraid to demonstrate that affection. It means never having to play it cool about how much you like something. It’s basically a license to proudly emote on a somewhat childish level rather than behave like a supposed adult. Being a geek is extremely liberating.”
Simon Pegg
Credit is always due
When you share work, credit the artist. What is it, who made it, when and where? Why are you sharing it, where can people see more of it, and where did you get it from? Attribution without a link is pointless; people have better things to do than go hunting for information on a whim, but they’ll click a link if there is one.
Share something every day, based on where you are in your process. It shows people that you’re alive and producing work on a regular basis, and complements a portfolio (especially a sparse one). The other benefit from the daily digest is the quantity of work – 90% of output is junk; accept that and make enough that it doesn’t matter.
“One day at a time […] is simple but it isn’t easy: out requires incredible support and fastidious structuring”
Russell Brand
The “so what?” test
Be open; share unfinished work, finished work, upcoming events – not personal stuff. Share because it can help or entertain (preferably both). Every time you share something, ask what it contributes – why should anyone care?
“Post as though everyone who can read it has the power to fire you.”
Lauren Cerand
Turn your flow into stock
Flow is your daily digest – posts, tweets and daily updates. Stock is durable content – stuff that’s still relevant or interesting months or years later. The balance is to maintain flow, while building stock.
The best way to generate stock is to collect, organise and expand on your flow. Revisit old ideas to find patterns (in ideas as well as behaviour), and turn those into larger works.
Build a good (domain) name
Depending on other people’s services is always a calculated risk. A personal website and domain gives you a stable base that won’t disappear overnight. Blogs turn flow into stock – they build up into a professional autobiography, documenting your development across years.
Artwork vs. art work By using social media, an artist can share as much or as little with their audience as they like with no cost.
“By putting things out there, consistently, you can form a relationship with your customers. It allows then to see the person behind the products.” (It Will Be Exhilarating, Provost and Gerhardt, quoted in Show Your Work! pp38)
Become a documentarian of what you do
There are people who would be interested in what you do, if you present it in the right way. In terms of building an audience, the process can more valuable than the product, and especially if your products aren’t readily shared.
By taking the hidden and discarded bits of art work and making them visible, you can build a parallel body of work that functions as a development sketchbook.
“Lone genius” is a dangerous myth, actively detrimental to success. Being part of a community (a “scenius”) is far more valuable than going alone – sharing ideas freely creates more ideas and each contribution, however small, is worthwhile. Shared resources, networking and an “ecology of talent” will get you further than you’ll get alone.
Internet communities, blogs, email division lists, chat servers – all sceniuses (scenii?).
“Stop asking what others can do for us, and start asking what we can do for others.” (pp12)
Be an amateur
Amateur – an enthusiast who pursues their passion regardless of the potential for fame, money or carer.
Unconstrained by the need to perform, amateurs are free to experiment with new things, follow ideas and whims share, geek out and celebrate their passions. They aren’t afraid of looking foolish if something doesn’t work out because they love engaging in their passion. The hallmark of an amateur is ‘learning out loud’ – succeeding and failing publicly and unashamedly.
Find a scenius, look at what others are sharing and – more importantly – what they aren’t sharing, and look at how toy can fill that vacancy. Do what you love and people will come to you.
You can’t find your voice if you don’t use it
Your voice is an intrinsic part of how you think about the world, informing what medium you use and how you use it, but the only way to find your voice is to talk about the things you love and that inspire you and why.
“If your work isn’t online, it doesn’t exist.” (pp23)
If you want people to know who you are and what you do, speak up.
Read obituaries
One day, you will die.
Staying mindful of that unassailable fact keeps you focused on the importance of every single day. Kleon calls obituaries “near-death experiences for cowards”. Seeing the sum of a person’s life in print, thinking about death every morning, makes them want to go out and live.
From 18 months, children start to draw in a manner characterised by random, circular scribbling (the circle being a natural shape given the configuration of the arm and shoulder). With the development of motor control comes early attempts at figurative drawing. Although the child is focused principally on faces, they’re primarily based on symbols and there’s little to distinguish between individuals and even non-human subjects.
The artist was 1 year 10 months when this was drawn. Soft crayon on paper. Uploaded by parent. (Wikimedia Commons; uploaded by Monika Wirthgen)
By three and a half, a child’s pictures reflect an increasing awareness of their environment: heads develop bodies (although the more important head is much larger). By four, details of clothing, fingers and toes appear, although the quantity of fingers and toes is somewhat creative (Edwards says they have seen drawings with thirty-one fingers on one hand and others with only one toe per foot). At this point, children begin to develop favourite ways of drawing various parts and repeat them frequently, embedding the technique in their muscle-memory.
Drawing by Oaklyn Ward, 3
At four to five years old, children start using narrative, exaggerating elements to convey importance, and at five or six, children start drawing landscapes, often featuring stereotypical box-like houses. Symbolism still reigns supreme: the ground is at the bottom of the picture plane and the sky is at the top; these elements are either represented by the edges of the paper or by a single line of colour.
The house may have windows with our without curtains, but the door always has a doorknob – something essential to its function. The composition of these landscapes are generally good, the pictures being balanced and executed with certainty.
Village Prelesne. Ukraine. Donetsk region. (Wikimedia Commons, uploaded by Yakudza)
By ten years old, children start to aim for greater complexity in their drawings. Composition is left by the wayside, along with a large degree of the certainty (or lack of regard for criticism) of younger childhood. Cartoons become a popular subject, using familiar symbols in a more sophisticated manner helps negate some of the criticism, and pictures are often small studies floating in space. Hands, feet and other problem areas are hidden behind the figure, or by some other contrivance, indicating a lack of confidence and a fragile ego.
Around the age of eleven, children begin to demand realism, but moving from the symbolic to the naturalistic is incredibly hard and young artists rapidly become disillusioned when they fall short. Fundamentally, many people fail to reconcile what they see with what they know is there and their verbal knowledge overrules their observation, resulting in a technically incorrect drawing. Although artists – most notably the Cubists – have explored this in the past, they do so from a foundation of technical competence and deliberate choice.
Of the two qualities Speed recommends (movement and authenticity), I would argue that authenticity is by far the more important. Movement is a skill that can be learned, but slavish imitation of another artist’s style is far more damaging both to an artist’s development and to their motivation. Personal style is best developed organically, without a lot of striving and searching, by following personal inclination and experimenting – with materials and theme and whatever else appeals – with enthusiasm and sincerity.
“Originality is more concerned with sincerity than with peculiarly.”
Although originality is often sincerely sought after and the result of this search is a kind of vitality, it’s a shallow vitality that isn’t anchored to a solid foundation of vision or concept and is liable to change suddenly or abruptly as new fads take the artist’s fancy. For art to be a thing of substance, it must consist of more than novelty. Striving to do better will lead to originality and bring with it a solid foundation of authenticity on which to build great things.
“All [the artist] can do is to be sincere and try to find out the things that really move him and that he really likes.”
While originality should not be sought for its own sake, it is equally futile to attempt to recreate past successes – the moment, once passed, can never be recaptured. For Speed, this means that copying the style of the old masters is an exercise in futility; their style is inextricably linked to their era, culture and history.
“It is only by scrupulously sincere and truthful attitude of mind that the new and original circumstances in which we find ourselves can be taken advantage of for the production of original work and self-consciously seeking after peculiarly only stops the natural evolution and produces abortions.”
In some cases, conventions are necessary. Materials have physical limitations that the artist has to work within (or around!). Never lose sight of the medium you’re working with, Speed says, and confine yourself to the qualities best expressed by the medium at hand.
The non-verbal part of the brain is concerned with spatial relationships – how deep is that curve, how long is that line, what is the angle between here and there? When it is active, or ability to label what we’re seeing falls away and we see only the whole image as a collection of masses to be described in relation to each other.
The shift to non-verbal processing can be made more difficult by the verbal brain’s habit of attaching preconceptions to how things look (symbolic form language). We can assist the shift away from the symbolic by drawing things that are unfamiliar, confusing the verbal brain and letting the visual brain work with no notion of how things should look. Faces are notoriously easy to recognise, even upside down, although the Thatcher effect and our ability to see faces in clouds or wood grain suggests that that ability is based on the configuration of facial features rather than detailed observation of component elements.
Learning to draw is learning to access non-verbal thought processes by directing your attention towards visual information the verbal mode can’t process. I would argue that this bypassing of the everyday thought process, along with the sense of ‘lost time’ when emerging from the visual mode of processing, makes drawing an altered state of consciousness. With that concept in mind, I can provoke the shift to visual-mode by using similar tools to the ones I use to start meditation – breathing exercises, music, scent, or some small preliminary ritual (perhaps sharpening pencils and laying them out).
I struggled to keep focused during the face/vase exercise. My mind kept wandering to thinking about the books I was reading or plans for the future, and I’m not sure if I managed the mental shift at all. This exercise was done during a business trip to the States, so I’d argue that jetlag was a factor, but equally, Edwards did warn that the shift couldn’t be observed and I was looking for it. On the first try, filling in the right profile, I couldn’t see the face by the time I got to the chin, and went back to correct the ‘vase’.
I experienced the mental block Edwards describes and overcame it by concentrating on the angles, line length and proportions on the line I was drawing. I did the left-handed task as well, to see what the difference was and also have another got at the task. It was a lot harder, mainly because I couldn’t see the line I was supposed to be copying, but I again I struggled to reach the correct thought mode.
Drawing upside down
In all of the pictures, the face was the hardest part to draw; the
ability to recognise a face or hands – even upside down – was
surprisingly hard to overcome.
Exercise 6A: Portrait of Igor Stravinsky (after Picasso)
Exercise 6B: Frontal view of a horse (study after unknown artist)
Exercise 6C: Horse and Rider (study after unknown artist)
Exercise 6D: Seated Woman (after Egon Schiele)
As with the face/vase illusion, I had a lot of mental chatter and ignoring it led to increasingly emotive subjects (imagined conversations, ‘what if’ scenarios, anxieties, regrets). At one point during the first drawing, my mind simply repeated the phrase ‘this is boring’ and pointing out how uncomfortable I was and urging me to take a break. Although I was largely able to ignore the intrusive thoughts, it was difficult to stay on task. For the second task, I began blocking in approximate masses before drawing and found that very helpful (Edwards said to copy the picture, she never specified how to go about it), but in the third drawing, my mind wandered completely, resulting in glaring inaccuracies.
During the fourth drawing, my partner was playing music in another room and that gave my verbal thought processes something to puzzle over, resulting in fewer distractions and considerably fewer inaccuracies. Once the music switched off, the distraction returned, but I was already engaged with the picture and able to finish with minimal fuss.
A strict education has the unfortunate habit of leaving students’ work flat and lifeless and Speed puts the blame for this squarely at the foot of schools that fail to allow teachers time to practice their art or, worse, teachers who aren’t practising artists art all. The flip side of that coin is schools who invite a series of visiting artists in for a month or two, and risk confusing less able students by overwhelming them with methods and techniques.
The biggest mistake art educators make is to teach students to copy instead of to observe. Although ‘painstaking accuracy’ should be the goal of any student serious about their art, conflating technical studies and artistic expression, and rewarding and encouraging the former at the expense of the latter is as harmful to the student as the complete neglect of the former. To counter this, Speed suggests educators give awards and recognition for artistic expression as well as technical merit.
It is difficult to explain what is wrong with an academic drawing, and what is the difference between it and a fine drawing. But perhaps this difference can be brought home a little more clearly if you will pardon a rather fanciful simile. I am told that if you construct a perfectly fitted engine —the piston fitting the cylinder with absolute accuracy and the axles their sockets with no space between, &c.—it will not work, but be a lifeless mass of iron. There must be enough play between the vital parts to allow of some movement; “dither” is, I believe, the Scotch word for it. The piston must be allowed some play in the opening of the cylinder through which it passes, or it will not be able to move and show any life. And the axles of the wheels in their sockets, and, in fact, all parts of the machine where life and movement are to occur, must have this play, this “dither.” It has always seemed to me that the accurately fitting engine was like a good academic drawing, in a way a perfect piece of workmanship, but lifeless. Imperfectly perfect, because there was no room left for the play of life. And to carry the simile further, if you allow too great a play between the parts, so that they fit one over the other too loosely, the engine will lose power and become a poor rickety thing. There must be the smallest amount of play that will allow of its working. And the more perfectly made the engine, the less will the amount of this “dither” be.
It’s this ‘dither’ that creates an artist’s personal style and the ineffable vitality in any well-executed picture. Any drawing done from life and with feeling can’t help but exhibit this dither because the artist can’t not put themselves into their work when they work with feeling. That said, reworked pictures often lose their spark and even master artists struggle to transfer the initial feeling from the sketch to the final image without the impression given by live observation.
Jamie, by me (circa that awkward ‘realism’ stage)
Unfortunately, only the technical aspect of creation can be taught. The character of a subject must be observed by the student; all the master can do is encourage it when they see it and, at the risk of repeating myself repeating Speed, “the test [of a quality drawing] is whether it has life and conveys genuine feeling.”With that in mind, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the best way forward is for the artist to eschew all stylisation, aesthetic movement or convention and paint strictly what they see and, in doing so, choosing realism which is itself a convention, and a difficult target to aim for. In Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, Edwards says that this is a common stage in drawing development and often the precursor to young artists quitting drawing altogether as the quality they strive for seems impossible to reach and their work seems to get less pleasing as it gets more realistic.
“After a certain point, the nearer you picture approaches the actual illusion of natural appearance, the further you are from the expression of life.”
Ronald Reagan, by Jason Seiler
This is, more or less, the textbook definition of the uncanny valley (a phase coined by roboticist Mashahiro Moti, and connected to Jentsch’s ‘Uncanny’ (On the Psychology of the Uncanny, 1906) and Freud’s expansion thereupon (The Uncanny, 1919). The effect is enhanced by the realistic rendering of exaggerated features.
To minimise this effect, Speed recommends movement – “the nearer you approach the actual in all its completeness, the more evident is the lack of that movement which always accompanies life” – but also authenticity – “however abstract and unrealistic the manner adopted, if it had been truly felt by the artist as the right means of expressing his emotional idea, it will have life […]. It is only when a painter consciously chooses a manner not his own […] that his picture its ridiculous and conventional in the dead sense.”
According to Speed, mass drawing is “based on the consideration of flat appearances on the retina, with the knowledge of the felt shapes of objects for the time being forgotten”, and is ‘the natural means of expression when a brush full of paint is in your hands’.
If line drawing is a collection of objects in space, mass drawing is purely the visual appearance on the picture plane.
Las Meninas by Velázquez, 1656
The first western image painted exclusively with this technique was probably Las Menenas by Velázquez, which emulates the eye’s field of vision by making the figures furthest from the focal point significantly more less detailed than the Infanta at the focal point.
By painting exactly what he saw, Velázquez removes the boundaries between the viewer and the scene but in doing so, argues Speed, Las Meninas loses its emotional significance (something I find debatable, given Wikipedia’s assertion that it’s one of, if not the most-discussed paintings in western art history).
The final destination of Velázquez’s path is the Impressionist movement: “emancipated from the objective world, [the Impressionists] no longer dissected the object to see what was inside it, but studied rather the anatomy of the light refracted from it to their eyes.”
But the assumption that we see only with the eye is wrong – we see with our mind as well. The lasting impression any scene leaves on a viewer is not caused by scenery alone, but by the emotions the scene creates. A good painting is one that provides the same simulation and, by painting exactly what they saw rather than exercising design and painting only what moved them, the Impressionists were doomed to fail. Despite this, the Impressionists opened up new avenues of subject matter and it’s not possible to understate their influence on the art world.
Images from Wikimedia Commons
Speed then compares the idealised make form of Michelangelo with Degas’ ballerinas, pointing out the difference in the way the two artists treat their subjects; Michelangelo’s lack identifying features and are heavy and stylised, while Degas’ ballerinas are clearly individuals, suggesting that this is a result of mass drawing being able to show the world-as-seen whilst Michelangelo was still labouring under the rule of line and spacial form and all its limitations.
