Slowly slowly slowly I have built an unwavering confidence in my art. I'm convinced that it's worthwhile.
My conviction is the result of a million failures. Every single drawing of mine is the carving away of unwanted lines, I draw and erase and redraw and erase. Every person I draw is loaded with the ghosts of many others, an evolving person who I've decided at some point to stick down on the spot. Every successful drawing is only the product of many failures.
In a really lovely way you can't have one without the other. To be really good at something you also need to know what it feels, looks and sounds like to do poorly at it. So in a very grand way, the notion of talent is a farce. Talent is the accumulation of mediocrity. You won't become worse at something by doing it continually. It follows that I'm convinced that I do well, and only because I do [verb], continually.
Why bother doing well creatively? For most of my life that question underpinned my drawing practice. I couldn't rationalise the benefit of hunching over paper for hours. I was looking at my art as though it existed only for me, like an extension of my body that it wasn't anybody else's right to touch. Now I know that an artwork is comprised of at least 50% your brain, and without other people looking at it an artwork might as well be a rock. So now my drawings are like little half unwrapped gifts, things I want to give away and watch grow up at some distance. Little parcels of politics, commenting on this and that in witty, underhanded ways.
Lots of creativity theorists talk about the "zone". It's the psychological landing strip where you can spend five human hours watching a pencil land and take off and think without too many words. It's like pleasant anaesthetic, where everything beyond the white rectangle of paper becomes dull and fuzzy, and everything you do on the paper has your unadulterated attention. Anybody can get there.
My conviction is the result of a million failures. Every single drawing of mine is the carving away of unwanted lines, I draw and erase and redraw and erase. Every person I draw is loaded with the ghosts of many others, an evolving person who I've decided at some point to stick down on the spot. Every successful drawing is only the product of many failures.
In a really lovely way you can't have one without the other. To be really good at something you also need to know what it feels, looks and sounds like to do poorly at it. So in a very grand way, the notion of talent is a farce. Talent is the accumulation of mediocrity. You won't become worse at something by doing it continually. It follows that I'm convinced that I do well, and only because I do [verb], continually.
Why bother doing well creatively? For most of my life that question underpinned my drawing practice. I couldn't rationalise the benefit of hunching over paper for hours. I was looking at my art as though it existed only for me, like an extension of my body that it wasn't anybody else's right to touch. Now I know that an artwork is comprised of at least 50% your brain, and without other people looking at it an artwork might as well be a rock. So now my drawings are like little half unwrapped gifts, things I want to give away and watch grow up at some distance. Little parcels of politics, commenting on this and that in witty, underhanded ways.
Lots of creativity theorists talk about the "zone". It's the psychological landing strip where you can spend five human hours watching a pencil land and take off and think without too many words. It's like pleasant anaesthetic, where everything beyond the white rectangle of paper becomes dull and fuzzy, and everything you do on the paper has your unadulterated attention. Anybody can get there.
Paper! Paper! burning white
Take my sacrificial rite!
A thousand drawings not so great
Consigned to this flat tepid fate
In these lines I'm poorly scrawling
There's a good one, and it's calling -
"Hi I'm here, come pull me out,
And quick you fumbling dawdling clout!"
