Part 2
This Part continues the process of discovering who you
are as an artist and what you want to create. A principle tool is
observation of the work of others and analysis of your response to it.
In this Part we present several guidelines and exercises to help you do
this. At the end of this Part, we will look at the issues of setting
goals and creating plans.
Table of Contents
Discovering
the Kind of Artist I Am or Want to Be
This applies to Objective
number 1, Part 1. It also
offers another approach to considering the questions in Part 1. There
are many
ways that an answer to the question implied in the title above might be
approached. We
offer a
set of categories that reflect the relative amount of time, effort and
degree of development of personal style you are interested in applying
to your art. These categories also reflect a measure of commitment and
success in art world terms. The right category for you is the one that
most closely meets your personal objectives and interests. Expect to
move into different categories as your work evolves.
- You are a casual artist painting for family friends
and the fun of it. You are not interested in extensive courses or
competition with others. You paint when you feel like it. Often, days
or weeks go by without lifting a brush.
- You are still a casual artist but you may have an
interest in showing your works at local craft shows and art fairs. You
may have joined a local art association and may be interested in taking
courses. Art has become important to you to the extent you will paint,
read or attend meetings or workshops at least once or twice a week. You
have a desire to improve.
- You may be seriously entering juried shows and are
very aware of your position in the local art community. You may be
beginning to exhibit your work in cafes and similar venues. You are
painting several times a week and are building some discipline into
your schedule. You have the sense that you want to take your work
seriously.
- Your work is showing a clear personal style and you
may be in or seeking commercial gallery representation. You are now
painting several hours a day at least 3 or 4 days a week.
- You have established a regional presence and are
represented in galleries or shows in neighbouring cities. Art is a 9-5
job in the sense you put in at least 40 hours a week. This is not just
studio time but reading, critical reflection and perhaps teaching.
- You have established a national and/or an
international presence in terms of exhibition and marketing. Public
gallery curators are becoming aware of you and/or you are enjoying
commercial success. Art is a priority in your
life second only to family and income needs.
What this list is designed to imply is that the measure
of achievement is directly related to the amount of effort you put in.
The goals that you set for yourself, at the end of this Part, can
relate to these relative levels
of achievement. The important thing is to be honest with yourself at
this moment. Next year you may have significantly different goals, but
the ones you set right now should be achievable with an acceptable
degree of comfort and pain (I don't know a single serious artist that
does not experience periods of crisis, anxiety, depression, despair or
other feelings about their work and their career that are uncomfortable
to say the least).
It is possible to move up in this list without an
emphasis on, or an interest in commercial representation or public
visibility. If this is the case, however, you will need a lot
of storage space.
Whatever category you decide you fit into, you should
define for yourself what would be your measure of success. This will be
closely related to the goals that you set. In a sense, these
would be the long range goals for your work. One category is no better
or worse
than another as a goal unless it fails to meet your personal objectives
and
needs.
Learning
from Other Artists
We can learn a lot from studying the work of others,
often more than we might learn from our own work. Certainly, the work
of others can give insight or inspiration to us allowing our own work
to move forward. Consider these questions:
- What do I like/dislike about the work of person X?
Sources of viewing work may include visits to galleries and
exhibitions, magazines,
books and Internet searches. You may choose a source that focuses on a
single artist or on several.
- Pick one source. For each piece, identify and make a
list of the features that you particularly like and dislike. Write a
brief statement of how you would like this to influence your own work.
- As a means of identifying features, try the following
exercises:
- Spend no more than 1 or 2 seconds observing a piece
– really just a glance. Then spend as much time as necessary
observing your reaction to it. Record the first thought that comes to
mind as likely the most important. Describe the reaction as fully as
possible but don’t describe two separate reactions. This
exercise
is based on the premise described by Malcolm Gladwell in his book "Blink".
The thin "cognitive slice" composed of the first one or two seconds of
an experience contains most of the information we can know about it.
- Spend 5 minutes observing each piece (or at least a
number of pieces if there are many). Record the factors that move your
attention, the insights and discoveries you make.
- Make a second pass through the source with brief
glances
searching for pieces that stand out or have exceptional impact. Here,
you are doing a rapid screening trying to select key images from a
total
perspective.
- Note any pieces that evoke an instantaneous
“wow, that’s the one!” response. Try and
analyze why the piece is a blockbuster.
- Make a list of characteristics that occur in the art
you like. Make a second list of characteristics that are not in the art
you like but are in art that you dislike. Can you sharpen your sense of
personal interest and expression from these lists?
It is important to understand that we can like the work
of an artist without the need to have to paint like them.
Learning
from Other Sources
In a similar manner to how we can learn from the work of
other artists, we can learn from a diverse range of sources. Consider
these questions:
- What do I like/dislike about the images I find in a
particular source? Use a picture book on foreign travel or on a
specific theme. There are multitudinous books on wildlife, lakes and
rivers, national parks and sights, people, specific countries, etc.
Often these can be purchased in remainder sales, rummage sales and many
other discount venues. Your public library is a good reference source.
- A good photographer, as an artist, has carefully set
up the composition, lighting, colour, texture, mood and many other
variables for each shot taken. Study the work of photographers as
intensely as you study the work of other visual artists. Make a list of
the elements that particularly engage you as you go through the book.
Write a paragraph on each element on how you might integrate it into
your work as personal expressive style.
- What catches my attention in my surroundings? Wander
through a park, walk a hiking trail, explore a part of your town or
city. Note what attracts your interest in terms of theme (content),
colour, emotion (content), design or any other response. As an aid, use
a viewer. This is a
piece of card with a 2” by 3” rectangular hole cut
in it. Hold this in front of you to isolate a part of your visual field.
Evaluating
Art
Good and bad, right and wrong, are not absolute
concepts. They are personal judgments based on criteria that should be
clearly delineated. We suggest that an answer to the questions we pose
in exercises is ‘right’ or
‘good’ to the degree it accurately or truthfully
reflects what the case actually is for you personally in the moment.
In evaluating a work of art, the following questions may
be helpful.
- How well does a work conform to the
artist’s intentions?
- How well are principles of design and composition
used in expressing the artist’s idea? Some specific questions
that may help you to assess a work are:
- Is there a pleasing progression of values?
Are the darks too dark?
Would the picture be improved with the
removal of some white (or other colour) shapes or spaces?
- Are there distinct elements such as squares,
triangles,
circles, animals, faces, or other objects that appear in the
work and draw the
eye, causing distraction from the central theme?
- Is there a (primary) colour missing?
- Is the temperature of the painting pleasing or is
there an
uneven balance between warm and cool colours?
- Is the work easily identifiable as being a painting
by artist X?
Is the center of interest in an attractive place?
- What first grabs your interest with this work?
- Is all that the artist has to say, easily taken in
at
first glance, or is the work intriguing enough that the viewer has to
participate?
- Is the image balanced? Is symmetry used? Is it too
symmetrical?
- Has there been a value or colour change on all four
edges of the surface?
- When there is a directional change, is there also a
change in colour and or value?
- Are all edges of a form treated alike or are some
hard and others softened and diffused?
- Are there any visually boring continuous lines,
which could be broken for better effect?
- Is the perspective and drawing correct, or at least
artistically expressed?
- Has the artist used a consistent style and approach
throughout the work?
- Are the various shapes in the work connected and
interlocked?
As an observer, ask yourself these questions:
- How effectively does the work engage me?
- Does it hold my attention?
- Do I want to spend time examining the work?
- Do I want to return to it?
- What are the feelings or impressions it
creates for me?
- Do I feel satisfied by it or not?
- Does it hold surprise?
- Am I encouraged to explore it, think about it or
revisit it?
For evaluating your own work in particular, consider
these questions:
- Looking at a significant part of your
recent work (no more than 3 years old):
- Do you see consistency?
- Do your work show clarity of vision and concept?
- If it does, what is it? If it doesn't, what do you
want it to be?
- Does your work exhibit a personal style or visual
language and vocabulary?
- A measure of you success in conceptual exploration
can be
gotten by deciding which of the following categories describes your
process:
- You remain with a concept until you have developed
a reasonable body of work.
- You move on after 3 or 4 paintings.
- You have no identifiable series but are mainly
exploring technique and experimenting.
- What are the essential elements that characterize
your work? List them.
- Where do the problems lie for you. What needs
improvement.
- What are the changes that you want to make in your
work? what is holding you back?
Categorizing
Art
In viewing the work of others, the following
categories
may be useful in identifying dominant elements of a work. See if they
become useful when observing, critiquing or analyzing the work of
others as well as your own.
Design
The elements of design are discussed in a separate
section due to their importance as the basis of construction of any
work of art. The domination of one or more elements offers a means of
characterizing an individual work or an oeuvre.
Content
Every work contains content even if it is no (the
null)
content. As such, content and its means of expression are often used to
characterize a single work, an oeuvre, or the work of a group of
related artists, otherwise known as a movement. Some useful terms for
identifying content are:
- Realism:
a faithful depiction of subjects as they appear in everyday life,
without significant embellishment or interpretation.
- Abstraction: the
process of reducing the information content of a concept
or real imagery, typically in order to retain only information which is
relevant for a particular purpose.
- Surrealism:
the distortion of real imagery by adding, subtracting or modifying
properties, to create a dream-like or other image that could
not happen in a conventional reality.
- Non-objectivism:
the creation of imagery containing no recognizable subject matter. Also
known as non-representational
art.
The art world is full of ’isms’,
often with unclear boundaries and overlapping examples.
Style
Style refers to how an artist renders his work. A
few
possible categories include:
- Painterly:
refers to the use of visible brush strokes, and/or a rough impasto
surface.
- Gestural:
refers to the application of paint in free sweeping gestures with the
brush.
- Expressionistic:
refers to art in which the artist's aim is to distort reality for an
emotional effect.
Goal
Setting and Planning
“If you don’t know
where
you are going, any route will take you there.”
Whereas the first exercises of this program were
designed to help you understand the artist that you are and the artist
you want to become, this section deals with setting goals to help you
get there.
Topics
for Goals
A goal usually has a particular theme or topic. As
such,
the following are themes that relate to art that you may wish to
consider when setting goals.
- Public appeal. Your art will appeal to only a
subset
of the general population. This is an issue in marketing and becomes
a concern to the degree that positive feedback is helpful or necessary
to you as an artist and a person. Often in developing a personal style,
the subset that finds your work attractive is small. Arguably, some
artists have chosen widespread appeal as a major goal in itself and
have developed a style to support it. Trish Romance and Thomas Kincade
are good examples.
- Financial. This in part is related to the point
above. Issues to consider range from no concern for financial return to
recovery of material costs, recovery of all costs and making a living
as an artist.
- Recognition. This includes participation in shows
either juried or non-juried, solo shows, private gallery representation
and inclusion in public collections. Consider if awards are something
to be sought after.
Short
Term
The time period covered by short term goals is
arbitrary. A manageable period can be a year. Decide what you want to
accomplish in the year. Decide how far you want your career and
abilities to progress.
An example might be “I want to paint water
that looks like water” or “I want to be represented
by a local gallery”.
Long Term
These might be called career goals. These are
typically
multi-year. They should follow from a succession of short term goals.
In other words, having set your first set of short term goals, you
should be able to construct subsequent sets of short term goals, each
following from the previous one, until your long term goal is reached.
The idea is to create goals that are realistic and that appear
attainable. Certainly the farther out one sets goals, the less accurate
they become. But a pathway should at
least be apparent.
An example might be “I want to be selling
my
work in major cities across Canada ” or “I want to
master landscape painting so that it becomes second nature to
me”. A long range goal of becoming a great landscape painter
might involve several shorter term goals dealing with mastery of
colour, experience with different landscape elements such as trees,
rocks and water, drawing and design, and studies in materials and
techniques.
Use
of
Goals
Goals need to be set on a regular basis.
Goals need to be reevaluated periodically at
intervals
relative to their length.
Plans
Now that you've set your goals, you need to
create plans to get you there. A plan is a specific sequence of
concrete
actions that if executed successfully should result in your having
attained your goal.
Using the example of painting water, I
might plan to take a workshop with a certain artist, buy a book or
instructional video, and plan to spend two days a week trying to paint
local rivers or lakes.
A plan takes you from where you are and gets you to
your
goal. It must be detailed enough so that you clearly understand each
step that will be required and are confident that the effort, time
and resources you intend to devote to each step are reasonable.
Good plans involve regular assessment of progress.
If
it
is clear that the plan was unrealistic then it must be amended to
something that is workable. Goals may have to be reassessed in
the process.
|